Mosquito breeding sites: Indonesia, Kenya, Costa Rica

Finding discarded tires and trash, where dengue mosquitoes breed, in drone images from Indonesia, Kenya and Costa Rica.

Discarded tires and trash collect rainwater and are some of the most productive breeding sites for the mosquito that spreads dengue. Finding them on foot is slow and misses many.

• Indonesia: I trained the deep learning model that finds tires in drone imagery of Makassar, and I take the imagery from raw drone photos to finished maps. I’m now building the next model, which sorts trash piles into types as well as finding tires.
• Kenya: the same group built a way to spot trash piles and tires in drone images and checked it against surveys on foot.
• Costa Rica: I planned drone flights in two regions and lead the analysis: testing whether our tire model works in towns it was never trained on, and scaling drone maps up to satellite imagery.

Papers: Hassan, Chamberlin et al. 2026, Remote Sensing Applications: Society and Environment · Woo et al. 2026, Parasites & Vectors · Tarpenning et al. 2025, Parasites & Vectors · Rosser et al. 2024, Environmental Science and Pollution Research · Bramante et al. 2026, BMC Global and Public Health

Code: Aedes-Tire-Detection (tire model, MIT license)

Figures from Hassan, Chamberlin et al. 2026, CC BY-NC.