Ph.D. student Andrea Hess was the lead author on a paper entitled Identifying Environmental Risk Factors and Mapping the Distribution of West Nile Virus in an Endemic Region of North America that was published in the journal GeoHealth. Andrea developed maps of West Nile virus transmission risk for South Dakota and found that integrating multiple types of geospatial data improved map accuracy. Elevation, land cover, soils, summer climate, and remotely sensed spring land surface moisture were all associated with West Nile virus cases and were used as predictors in the final map.