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The health of the individual is one of the most important indicators of good living and quality of life for the community. Therefore, the contribution of developing of public health sector management and monitoring of diseases related to the cultural, economic, and social progress of any society. Moreover, the diseases occur from spatial factors where the distribution and concentration differ in diverse positions. Hence, GIS can be used as a decision support system in order to help the mangers, assess and monitoring of various types of diseases. Thus, this research aims to define a spatial distribution, prediction of risks and analysis of disease hazard areas in Kirkuk city, north east of Iraq using two models evidential belief function (EBF) and Inverse distance weighting (IDW). IDW determines the correlation between conditioning factors and disease occurrence. Consequently, EBF can be used to assess the effect of each class of conditioning factors on diseases occurrence. The result shows that Al-Wasity quarter reports the highest range of the patients who have the blood diseases (D89-D50) in 2017. Contrary, the northern parts of the city and some quarters in the center of the city (Tessen, Bagdad road, Al-Mansor) reflect the lowest range of the patients in blood diseases. Eye diseases (H59-H00) and its accessories have the same spatial distribution. The result also demonstrated that the GIS based spatial techniques is provided a prospect to simplify and measure the epidemic state of different diseases within specific areas(minor part of Kirkuk city), and lay a base to pursue future surveys into the environmental factors responsible for the augmented disease threat.

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Date palm is the major food source and possesses an important role in the economic aspects, environmental parts, and society. These crops were subjected to degradation due to the financial and numerous military conflicts. Because of the expensive cost of monitoring and managing date palm in field measurements, and limited studies using satellite images, the authors proposed a method to estimate and map date palm using the Landsat-8 satellite images. The authors applied the least-squares multiple regression and GIS techniques to find suitable predictors from the set of variables such as original bands of Landsat-8, Minimum Noise Fraction (MNF) transformation, tasseled cap component transformation, and spectral index. In order to validate the proposed method, the field measurement data were utilized to assess the estimated date palm from the Landsat-8 images. A linear combination of MNF Landsat-8 band 4 (red, 0.636-0.673 µm), Normalized Difference Moisture Index (NDMI) and Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) were the best date palm predictor (R2adj= 0.988, root-mean-squared error (RMSE) = 0.013). The results demonstrate that the MNF Landsat-8 images in the least square regression help improve the date palm estimation and mapping for the practical use in the study area with high accuracy.

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