Abstract
Climate change has significantly increased the length of pollen seasons and elevated airborne pollen levels, resulting in earlier and more intense allergy seasons. Coastal areas are particularly vulnerable, yet there is limited understanding of these impacts in such regions. This study focuses on Charleston, South Carolina, one of the states most affected by climate change. Different types of pollen can combine through inhalation or through similar responses to climate change. Understanding this clustering can help us develop better strategies to manage and reduce allergy symptoms. We collected environmental data and tree pollen data for multiple taxa from 2017 to 2021 from federal databases, and the National Allergy Bureau of AAAAI. A time-series cluster analysis was conducted on tree pollen concentrations, excluding the winter months, and we employed Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) to compute the pairwise optimal alignment of pollen counts across the years. Our analysis reveal three prominent clusters. A shift in pollen counts occurred in May during 2019-2021, whereas in 2021, it shifted to June. By analyzing the normalized distances, we found that the pollen counts of 2017 and 2018 were relatively similar, with a normalized distance of 28.5. In contrast, the pollen counts of the more recent year, 2021, differed significantly from 2017, with a normalized distance of 70.9. We observed a sharp increase (nearly two-fold) in pollen concentrations in the post-COVID years for the less dominant groups and the Juniper and Pinaceae families formed the most dominant cluster.
Presenters
Atin AdhikariProfessor, Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health, Georgia Southern University, Georgia, United States Arpita Chatterjee
Associate Professor, Mathematical Sciences, Georgia Southern University, United States Jayanta Gupta
Associate Professor, Health Sciences, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida, United States Sarah Sejoro
Graduate Student, Georgia Southern University , United States Oluwatoyin Ayo Farai
Student, MD, MPH, Georgia Southern University, Georgia, United States Jing Kersey
Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health/Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Environmental Health Sciences (BEES), Georgia Southern University, Georgia, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
Assessing Impacts in Diverse Ecosystems
KEYWORDS
POLLEN, CLUSTER ANALYSIS, SHIFTS, JUNIPER, PINACEAE
