Table 1.
List of the most important factors associated with soil-transmitted helminth infections grouped into categories.
Table 2.
Categorization of soil characteristics based on standard measurement and the measurements normalized and used in the current study.
Table 3.
Categorization of each soil characteristic found in each of the eight types of soil orders found in the territory that comprises Argentina.
Fig 1.
Summary of the methodology used to obtain and validate the predicted map.
Table 4.
Risk values for socioeconomic (SEC), environmental (EC) and soil (SC) characteristics for each city in Argentina with prevalence data for soil-transmitted helminths, observed prevalence categories and predicted categories of risk using the decision tree (DT) algorithm.
Fig 2.
Analytical Hierarchy Process coefficients for each indicator of socioeconomic (A), environmental (B) and soil characteristics (C). These values were obtained through the use of a decision matrix from which the relative importance of each variable was analyzed.
Fig 3.
Each point on the map represents a georeferenced city with the average socioeconomic data obtained from the last national census performed in 2010. Map created using QGIS Geographic Information System. Open Source Geospatial Foundation Project. http://qgis.osgeo.org.
Fig 4.
Environmental characteristics (EC) risk map.
This data was obtained using different sources such as WorldClim which is available until -50°S latitude, MODIS TERRA NDVI products obtained for a ten-year period (2004 to 2014), the mean of the warmest month calculated through a general vegetation approach (January NDVI mean), the SERENA project for land cover type data and altitude was obtained from the Space Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. Map created using QGIS Geographic Information System. Open Source Geospatial Foundation Project. http://qgis.osgeo.org.
Fig 5.
Soil characteristics (SC) risk map.
Each point represents a city and the different characteristics of the soil were obtained from a Soil Atlas of Argentina from the National Institute of Agricultural Technology. Map created using QGIS Geographic Information System. Open Source Geospatial Foundation Project. http://qgis.osgeo.org.
Fig 6.
Final RGB map developed to describe the predominant characteristic that increases the risk of soil transmitted helminths, the risk associated to socioeconomic characteristics is red, to environmental characteristics is green and to soil characteristics is blue.
Each point represents the combination obtained from the mix of these colors for each city. Map created using QGIS Geographic Information System. Open Source Geospatial Foundation Project. http://qgis.osgeo.org.
Fig 7.
Description of the values of SEC, EC and SC risk of Northern provinces, two localities from Formosa (Posta Cambio Zalazar and Clorinda) and one from Chaco (Capitán Solari).
Map created using QGIS Geographic Information System. Open Source Geospatial Foundation Project. http://qgis.osgeo.org.
Fig 8.
Hierarchical Decision Tree algorithm obtained with the prevalence training data set from the 20 studies published (Table 4).
Thresholds (T) with respect to the prevalence categories of risk identified in each node (characteristic) which corresponds to the characteristics included in the study, environment (TEnv), soil (TSoil) and socioeconomic (TSec). Squares are the final classification. Given this is a machine learning technique, the values would change responding to the different training sets offered (observed prevalence data).