A high-resolution satellite image from the SPOT 5 satellite during 2008 was used to generate a land cover classification in the malaria endemic lowland of North-Western Burkina Faso, centred around the Nouna city. A supervised land cover classification was carried out based on 45 training zones obtained during the 2008 ground campaign.

Land cover classes were built and correlated to land cover types known from literature for acting as Anopheles mosquito breeding sites.

Buffers zones of 500m radius were constructed around 30 villages. These buffer zones represent the assumed Anopheles mosquito flying range (Costantini et al., 1996; Ejercito and Urbino, 1951).

For the 30 villages included in the local demographic surveillance system, the area of potential habitats with very high risk (submerged and irrigated rice fields, water covered with vegetation and submerged vegetation) and high risk (field crops with clayey soil and turbid water) was calculated for the 500 m buffer zone.

Fig. 3 Villages with similar land cover risk in their 500 m buffer zones