The scale and extent of the effects of COVID-19 on our lives is unmatched by any other recent natural disaster. Effective management of the spread and consequences of this pandemic can reduce the burden on health and help in managing the different costs by relaxing restrictions. Understanding this need, our interdisciplinary team of geo and health scientists at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) developed a multi-layered interactive dashboard in March 2020. The dashboard provides an automatically updating map of COVID case numbers and their time series in Nebraska counties. Also, Nebraska’s pandemic response leaders can see each hospital and its number of beds and contact information, the location of dialysis centers, long term care facilities, and pharmacies; the name of the emergency response coordinator; and the number of electricity-dependent Medicare beneficiaries in each county. The UNMC Dashboard, has helped the emergency response and health departments of Nebraska. It has received attention from local to international level. In addition to garnering public recognition, the Dashboard established connections between our team and stakeholders in our original climate tracking projects, as well as with other groups with whom we had not previously collaborated. We have established a close connection with Nebraska Medicine, one of the top medical facilities in the region, and their demand forecasting team. Also, we have developed new connections with out of state contacts in health department, resulting into an expanded version of the dashboard. Additionally, the dashboard demonstrated our capabilities and strengthened our relationships with local health departments in Nebraska. One of our primary projects relates to public health emergency preparedness for extreme weather and climate events in Nebraska. The success of that project depends on collaboration with different health officials in the state, who are now more aware of our team and our capability to provide practical solutions and tools. We suggest that this system can adapt to different frameworks, such as the Emergency Risk Framework (ERF) by World Health Organization (WHO). Our system provides the foundation for the information sharing required by such systems -therefore helping with communication and decision making.

Heatwaves cause excess mortality and physiological impacts on humans throughout the world, and climate change will intensify and increase the frequency of heat events. Many adaptation and mitigation studies use spatial distribution of highly vulnerable local populations to inform heat reduction and response plans. However, most available heat vulnerability studies focus on urban areas with high heat intensification by Urban Heat Islands (UHIs). Rural areas encompass different environmental and socioeconomic issues that require alternative analyses of vulnerability. We categorized Nebraska census tracts into four urbanization levels, then conducted factor analyses on each group and captured different patterns of socioeconomic vulnerabilities among resulted Heat Vulnerability Indices (HVIs). While disability is the major component of HVI in two urbanized classes, lower education and races other than white have higher contributions in HVI for the two rural classes. To account for environmental vulnerability of HVI, we considered different land type combinations for each urban class based on their percentage areas and their differences in heat intensifications. Our results demonstrate different combination of initial variables in heat vulnerability among urban classes of Nebraska and clustering of high and low heat vulnerable areas within the highest urbanized section. Less urbanized areas show no spatial clustering of HVI. More studies with separation on urbanization level of residence can give insights into different socioeconomic vulnerability patterns in rural and urban areas, while also identifying changes in environmental variables that better capture heat intensification in rural settings.