ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Veterinary Humanities and Social Sciences
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fvets.2025.1612524
This article is part of the Research TopicVeterinary teaching in 2025: where we are and where we expect to goView all 13 articles
Integrating Geographic Information Systems into Veterinary Education according to the One Health Concept: an Interdisciplinary Approach
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
- 2Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos (IREC), UCLM-CSIC-JCCM, Ciudad Real, Spain
- 3Centre for Epidemiology and Planetary Health, Scotland's Rural College, Inverness, United Kingdom
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The importance of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for animal and public health, and epidemiology, along with the significant development of related technologies, make GIS an indispensable tool for the training of many health and environmental science programs. However, veterinary studies do not transversally address GIS training, as is done in other programs, and we identify a gap in this specialization among our veterinary students. Therefore, this work compiles various actions to improve the education of veterinary students in particular, and other interested individuals in general, which we initiated as part of a teaching innovation project at the University of Murcia. Using open-access tools, we developed tutorials, manuals and exercises with different complexity levels to work with GIS on topics related to animal health and public health in a One Health context. The tools used to develop work include online GIS applications, such as the European Rabies Bulletin (ERB) map options, free-access software, such as Epi Map from Epi Info 7, QGIS, or the open online options of ArcGIS. By applying a gradient of increasing complexity, we propose initial training actions using the ERB database with data from Europe since 1977, a database on a fictional rabbit disease in Murcia (Spain) for beginners with Epi Map and QGIS, and a database created from official bovine tuberculosis sanitation campaigns in Ciudad Real (Spain) from 2007 to 2011. The options for generating interactive files or publishing online using QGIS or ArcGIS, particularly through the story map feature in the latter, allow us to provide free and remote training with these projects. Most importantly, it generates data visualization options for health and production data, combined with risk factor layers, which are easily accessible to individuals without prior GIS training and allow them to get started with these technologies.
Keywords: Teaching innovation, Epi Map, QGIS, ArcGIS Story maps, European Rabies Bulletin, Coinfame dataset, Animal tuberculosis, One Health
Received: 15 Apr 2025; Accepted: 23 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Contreras, Cuevas, Rivera, Sánchez, Acevedo and Vicente. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Antonio Contreras, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.