Antonio López-Quílez

• PhD Statistics
• University of Valencia

Expert elicitation is a critical approach for addressing data scarcity across various disciplines. But moreover, it can also complement big data analytics by mitigating the limitations of observational data, such as incompleteness and reliability issues, thereby enhancing model estimates through the integration of disparate or conflicting data sour...

Hostile sexism reflects prejudices and hostile attitudes toward women that may justify and facilitate intimate partner violence (IPV). The present study aimed to measure and map hostile sexism attitudes at the neighborhood level, and analyzed whether neighborhood-level hostile sexism was associated with the risk of IPV across city neighborhoods (Va...

In ecology and environmental sciences, combining diverse datasets has become an essential tool for managing the increasing complexity and volume of ecological data. However, as data complexity and volume grow, the computational demands of previously proposed models for data integration escalate, creating significant challenges for practical impleme...

The global population is projected to reach nearly 10 billion by the end of the 21st century, posing unprecedented challenges for agricultural systems to ensure food security while maintaining sustainability [...]

Changes in land use patterns have significant environmental and socioeconomic impacts, making it crucial for policymakers to understand their causes and consequences. This study, part of the European LAMASUS (Land Management for Sustainability) project, aims to support the EU's climate neutrality target by developing a gover-nance model through col...

Plant pests may pose a significant threat to global agriculture, natural ecosystems and biodiversity, causing severe ecological and economic damage. Identifying regions more susceptible to pest introductions is crucial for developing effective prevention, early detection and outbreak response strategies. While historical data on pest introductions...

Intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) is a global problem, and suicidal behaviour is one of its most serious consequences. However, no study has investigated the spatial overlap between the two. The aim of this paper is to analyse whether there is spatial overlap between IPVAW and suicide-related calls in the same neighbourhoods, and to i...

Multivariate spatial disease mapping has become a pivotal part of everyday practice in social epidemiology. Despite the existence of several specifications for the relation between different outcomes, there is still a need for a new strategy that focuses on comparing the spatial risk patterns of different subgroups of the population. This paper int...

Plant pests pose a significant threat to global agriculture, natural ecosystems and biodiversity, causing severe ecological and economic damage. Identifying regions more susceptible to pest introductions is crucial for developing effective prevention, early detection and outbreak response strategies. While historical data on pest introductions in t...

Changes in land use patterns have significant environmental and socioeconomic impacts, making it crucial for policymakers to understand their causes and consequences. This study, part of the European LAMASUS (Land Management for Sustainability) project, aims to support the EU's climate neutrality target by developing a governance model through coll...

Combining data has become an indispensable tool for managing the current diversity and abundance of data. But, as data complexity and data volume swell, the computational demands of previously proposed models for combining data escalate proportionally, posing a significant challenge to practical implementation. This study presents a sequential cons...

The implementation of social policies can have a marked spatial imprint under certain conditions, including non-place-based policies. The issue has not been systematically addressed in the literature, although there are important contributions in this regard. The main aim of this chapter is to articulate a straightforward, evidence-based framework...

Objective: The aim of this study was to conduct a comprehensive spatio-temporal analysis of suicide-related emergency calls in the city of Valencia (Spain) over a six-year period. To this end we first examined age and gender patterns and, second, the influence of neighborhood characteristics on general and gender-specific spatio-temporal patterns o...

Understanding and predicting forest fires have proved a highly difficult endeavour, which requires extending and adapting complex models used in different fields. Here, we apply a marked point process approach, commonly used in ecology, which uses multiple Gaussian random fields to represent dynamics of Mediterranean forest fires in a spatio-tempor...

Outbreak response to quarantine pathogens and pests in the European Union (EU) is regulated by the EU Plant Health Law, but the performance of outbreak management plans in terms of their effectiveness and efficiency has been quantified only to a limited extent. As a case study, the disease dynamics of almond leaf scorch, caused by Xylella fastidios...

In the study of plant disease epidemics, the state of each individual in the population and their spatial location should be considered when modeling disease spread. We present a model to describe the spread of plant diseases, where the infection of a susceptible individual depends on the transmission rate of infected individuals and the spatial co...

Intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) is the most common form of violence experienced by women, with a global prevalence estimated between 22% and 30%. In Spain, according to the latest national survey on IPVAW conducted in 2019, 14.2% of all women aged 16 or older have suffered physical and/or sexual IPVAW at some point in their lives. D...

Continuous space species distribution models (SDMs) have a long-standing history as a valuable tool in ecological statistical analysis. Geostatistical and preferential models are both common models in ecology. Geostatistical models are employed when the process under study is independent of the sampling locations, while preferential models are empl...

Extreme events have been studied in the field of ecology for many years, either from a purely descriptive point of view in its principles, or last decades from an inferential and/or predictive perspective to try to understand them. The first problem to be addressed in the study of extreme events is the definition of the event itself: can we speak o...

Suicide is a major social and public health problem, accounting for more than 700.000 deaths worldwide every year, according to the World Health Organization (2021). In Spain, suicide has become the leading cause of external death, with 11 people who died by suicide each day (INE, 2022). Several studies have been published studying risk factors bot...

Marine Ecosystem Models (MEMs) have been developed to analyse the past and future dynamics of life in the oceans. One of such efforts is EcoOcean, a complex, mechanistic and spatio-temporal explicit MEM of the global oceans based on a trophodynamic core. EcoOcean requires as inputs the species native ranges and suitable habitats, and for key enviro...

The plant pathogenic bacterium Xylella fastidiosa is a priority quarantine pathogen in the EU (Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/2072). In Alicante, Spain, the presence of X. fastid-iosa was first reported in 2017, as the cause of almond leaf scorch disease (ALSD). Based on the legislation that establishes specific measures against this...

In ecology, Species Distribution Models (SDMs) are a statistical tool that has seen a substantial expansion in its implementation over the last two decades. Along with their widespread use, the complexity of the data analysed and the structures of the models used have increased. This has led to the development of various tools to facilitate the inc...

Many sectors that rely heavily on natural ecosystem conditions, such as marine aquaculture, are affected by environmental instability that may be associated with climate change. In order to optimally plan the development of fish or shellfish farming, it is crucial to incorporate climate risk as a decisive factor in selecting marine areas that will...

In ecology we may find scenarios where the same phenomenon (species occurrence, species abundance, etc.) is observed using two different types of samplers. For instance, species data can be collected from scientific surveys with a completely random sample pattern, but also from opportunistic sampling (e.g., whale or bird watching fishery commercial...

This paper introduces a Laplace approximation to Bayesian inference in Dirichlet regression models, which can be used to analyze a set of variables on a simplex exhibiting skewness and heteroscedasticity, without having to transform the data. These data, which mainly consist of proportions or percentages of disjoint categories, are widely known as...

In the study of plant disease epidemics, there is often an interest in the state at the individual level to analyze disease progression, where the spatial structure of the population should be considered. Based on the disease status of the individuals, we developed a model to simulate plant disease spread in time and space, where the spatial depend...

In this paper, we propose a structured additive regression (STAR) model for modeling the occurrence of a disease in fields or nurseries. The methodological approach involves a Gaussian field (GF) affected by a spatial process represented by an approximation to a Gaussian Markov random field (GMRF). This modeling allows the building of maps with pre...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a promising management tool for the conservation and recovery of marine ecosystems, as well as fishery management. MPAs are generally established as permanent closures but marine systems are dynamic, which has generated debate in favour of more dynamic designs. As a consequence, the identification of priority areas...

Bayesian spatio-temporal models are an emerging research approach to the study of the ecological variations of child maltreatment at the neighborhood level. A small but growing number of studies are recently applying this perspective to analyze the neighborhood-level characteristics that influence the spatial distribution of child maltreatment in t...

Patients with chronic diseases are frequent users of healthcare services. The systematic use of stratification tools and predictive models for this group of patients can be useful for health professionals in decision-making processes. The aim of this study was to design two new classifier systems for detecting the risk of hospital admission for eld...

Genomic heterogeneity constitutes one of the most distinctive features of cancer diseases, limiting the efficacy and availability of medical treatments. Tumorigenesis emerges as a strongly stochastic process, producing a variable landscape of genomic configurations. In this context, matrix factorisation techniques represent a suitable approach for...

The EU plant health legislation enforces the implementation of intensive surveillance programs for quarantine pests. After an outbreak, surveys are implemented to delimit the extent of the infested zone and to manage disease control. Surveillance in agricultural and natural environments can be enhanced by increasing the survey efforts. Budget const...

Circular leaf spot (CLS), caused by Plurivorosphaerella nawae, is a serious disease affecting persimmon (Diospyros kaki) that is characterized by necrotic lesions on leaves, defoliation, and fruit drop. Under Mediterranean conditions, P. nawae forms pseudothecia in the leaf litter in winter, and ascospores are released in spring, infecting suscepti...

Traditionally, intimate-partner violence has been considered a special type of crime that occurs behind closed doors, with different characteristics from street-level crime. The aim of this study is to analyze the spatial overlap of police calls reporting street-level and behind-closed-doors crime. We analyzed geocoded police calls in the 552 censu...

We conducted a small-area ecological longitudinal study to analyze neighborhood contextual influences on the spatio-temporal variations in intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) risk in a southern European city over an eight-year period. We used geocoded data of IPVAW cases with associated protection orders (n = 5867) in the city of Valenc...

In this work, we discuss the use of a methodological approach for modelling spatial relationships among species by means of a Bayesian spatial coregionalized model. Inference and prediction is performed using the integrated nested Laplace approximation methodology to reduce the computational burden. We illustrate the performance of the coregionaliz...

Fishery restricted areas (FRAs) are pivotal for the mitigation of fishery impacts, but the designation of optimum FRAs is complex, and currently there is no quantitative guideline to assess the spatio-temporal variability of conservation priority areas. Fishery systems are naturally dynamic, and shifts may at two different levels, the species level...

Sensor noise sources cause differences in the signal recorded across pixels in a single image and across multiple images. This study presents a Bayesian approach to decomposing and characterising the sensor noise sources involved in imaging with digital cameras. A Bayesian probabilistic model based on the (theoretical) model for noise sources in im...

The plant-pathogenic bacterium Xylella fastidiosa was first reported in Europe in 2013, in the province of Lecce, Italy, where extensive areas were affected by the olive quick decline syndrome, caused by the subsp. pauca. In Alicante, Spain, almond leaf scorch, caused by X. fastidiosa subsp. multiplex, was detected in 2017. The effects of climatic...

Understanding the spatiotemporal persistence of fish distributions is key to defining fish hotspots and effective fisheries restricted areas (FRAs). Hierarchical Bayesian spatiotemporal models provide an excellent framework to understand these distributions as they can accommodate different spatiotemporal behaviour in the data, primarily due to the...

Background Considerable debate exists on whether the substantiation decision is a reliable measure for rates of maltreatment. Studies have shown that risks among children victims of maltreatment versus children investigated but unsubstantiated are similar. Objective This paper aims to respond to two research questions: (1) Do most child maltreatme...

Sensor noise sources cause differences in the signal recorded across pixels in a single image and across multiple images. This paper presents a Bayesian approach to decomposing and characterizing the sensor noise sources involved in imaging with digital cameras. A Bayesian probabilistic model based on the (theoretical) model for noise sources in im...

Forest fires are the outcome of a complex interaction between environmental factors, topography and socioeconomic factors (Bedia et al, 2014). Therefore, understand causality and early prediction are crucial elements for controlling such phenomenon and saving lives.The aim of this study is to build spatio-temporal model to understand causality of f...

Current legislation enforces the implementation of intensive surveillance programs for quarantine plant pathogens. After an outbreak, surveys are implemented to delimit the geographic extent of the pathogen and execute disease control. The feasibility of control programs is highly dependent on budget availability, thus it is necessary to target and...

Rapidly detecting the beginning of influenza outbreaks helps health authorities to reduce their impact. Accounting for the spatial distribution of the data can greatly improve the performance of an outbreak detection method by promptly detecting the first foci of infection. The use of Hidden Markov chains in temporal models has shown to be great to...

Circular leaf spot (CLS), caused by Plurivorosphaerella nawae, is a serious disease of persimmon (Diospyros kaki) inducing necrotic lesions on leaves, defoliation and fruit drop. Under Mediterranean conditions, P. nawae forms pseudothecia in the leaf litter during winter and ascospores are released in spring infecting susceptible leaves. Persimmon...

Bayesian spatial modeling is increasingly used for studying different social problems, including crime and violence. However, there is less research that has analyzed crime-related outcomes from a multivariate perspective. The aim of this study is to analyze the shared spatial structure for three types of police calls. The study was conducted in th...

The increasing development of techniques applied to species distribution models (SDMs) has allowed them to be widely used in different areas such as ecology and epidemiology. The SDMs are useful tools to establish suitable conditions for the expansion of populations, to evaluate the associations of biotic and abiotic factors with the geographic ext...

Xylella fastidiosa is a phytopathogenic bacterium regulated in the European Union (EU) to avoid its introduction and spread within all Member States. The current legal provisions specify the implementation of an intensive surveillance progam in those regions in which the presence of disease was confirmed. The main aim of this plan is to make an acc...

One of the major goals of ecology is to understand the spatio-temporal dynamics of species. Commonly the habitat relevance is analyzed using Species Distribution Models (SDMs). These models link information on the presence/absence or abundance of a species to environmental variables to predict where (and how much of) a species is likely to be prese...

Dirichlet regression models can be used to analyze a set of variables lying in a bounded interval that sum up to one exhibiting skewness and heteroscedasticity, without having to transform the data. These data which mainly consist of proportions or percentages of disjoint categories are widely known as compositional data and are common in areas suc...

This paper introduces a Laplace approximation to Bayesian inference in regression models for multivariate response variables. We focus on Dirichlet regression models, which can be used to analyze a set of variables on a simplex exhibiting skewness and heteroscedasticity, without having to transform the data. These data, which mainly consist of prop...

We jointly estimated relative risk for dengue and Zika virus disease (Zika) in Colombia, establishing the spatial association between them at the department and city levels for October 2015-December 2016. Cases of dengue and Zika were allocated to the 87 municipalities of 1 department and the 293 census sections of 1 city in Colombia. We fitted 8 h...

Background Alcohol outlet density has been linked to rates of substantiated maltreatment both cross-sectionally and over time. Most of these studies have been conducted in Anglo-Saxon countries, especially in the U.S., but other countries, where alcohol outlets and alcohol consumption may have different social meanings, are clearly underrepresente...

Usually in Ecology, the availability and quality of the data is not as good as we would like. For some species, the typical environmental study focuses on presence/absence data, and particularly with small animals as amphibians and reptiles, the number of presences can be rather small. The aim of this study is to develop a spatial model for studyin...

Epidemiological research on the pathogenesis, diagnosis, and treatment of infectious diseases is a broad field of study with renewed validity in the face of social changes and new threats [...]

Species Distribution Models (SDMs) are now being widely used in ecology for management and conservation purposes across terrestrial, freshwater, and marine realms. The increasing interest in SDMs has drawn the attention of ecologists to spatial models and, in particular, to geostatistical models, which are used to associate observations of species...

A methodological approach for modelling the spatial multivariate distribution of multiple bioclimatic indices is presented. The value of the indices is modelled by means of a Bayesian conditional coregionalised linear model. Elicitation of prior distributions and approximation of posterior distributions of the parameters in the proposed model are a...

Las llamadas que la Policía Local recibe diariamente movilizan actuaciones de estas fuerzas de seguridad que, entre otras cosas, facilitan la prevención de futuros delitos y problemáticas sociales. Pero no solo eso, la información que proporcionan estas llamadas puede desempeñar, igualmente, un papel relevante en el análisis y conocimiento de los p...

Climatic change is expected to affect forest development in the short term, as well as the spatial distribution of species in the long term. Species distribution models are potentially useful tools for guiding species choices in reforestation and forest management prescriptions to address climate change. The aim of this study is to build spatial an...

Risk maps of dengue disease offer to the public health officers a tool to model disease risk in space and time. We analyzed the geographical distribution of relative incidence risk of dengue disease in a high incidence city from Colombia, and its evolution in time during the period January 2009—December 2015, identifying regional effects at differe...

This study compared different spatio-temporal model structures to infer the distributional patterns of Mullus barbatus in the GSA06 of the Spanish Mediterranean using MEDITS trawl survey data, whic is performed every year in spring. Results indicate that Mullus barbatus follows a very persistent distribution at this time of the year.

The aim of this study is to estimate the parallel relative risk of Zika virus disease (ZVD) and dengue using spatio-temporal interaction effects models for one department and one city of Colombia during the 2015–2016 ZVD outbreak. We apply the integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) for parameter estimation, using the epidemiological week (E...

This study compared different spatio-temporal model structures to infer the distributional patterns of Lophius budegassa the GSA06 of the Spanish Mediterranean using MEDITS trawl survey data, which is performed every year in spring. Results indicate that Lophius budegassa follows a rather opportunistic distribution at this time of the year.

This study compared different spatio-temporal model structures to infer the distributional patterns of Illex coindetii in the GSA06 of the Spanish Mediterranean using MEDITS trawl survey data, whic is performed every year in spring. Results indicate that Illex coindetii follows a rather opportunistic distribution at this time of the year.

This study compared different spatio-temporal model structures to infer the distributional patterns of Merluccius merluccius the GSA06 of the Spanish Mediterranean using MEDITS trawl survey data, whic is performed every year in spring. Results indicate that Merluccius merluccius follows a progressive distribution, with certain persistence, at this...

This study compared different spatio-temporal model structures to infer the distributional patterns of Lophius piscatorius the GSA06 of the Spanish Mediterranean using MEDITS trawl survey data, which is performed every year in spring. Results indicate that Lophius piscatorius follows a opportunistic distribution at this time of the year.

In this study, we analyze first whether there is a common spatial distribution of child maltreatment (CM) and intimate partner violence (IPV), and second, whether the risks of CM and IPV are influenced by the same neighborhood characteristics, and if these risks spatially overlap. To this end we used geocoded data of CM referrals (N = 588) and IPV...

Spatiotemporal modeling of relative risk of dengue disease provides useful risk maps for surveillance and forecasting. The objective of the study was to generate smoothed estimates of relative risk applying hierarchical Bayesian spatiotemporal models, including covariates derived from satellite images containing land surface temperature (LST) and n...

Fishing activity in waters beyond national jurisdiction generates multiple management issues, such as data poor fisheries, management of straddling fish stocks and lack of impact assessments on deep-sea Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs). Fishing strategy is the key to understanding and managing high seas fisheries, targeting highly migratory reso...

Previous research has shown that neighborhood-level variables such as social deprivation, social fragmentation or rurality are related to suicide risk, but most of these studies have been conducted in the U.S. or northern European countries. The aim of this study was to analyze the spatio-temporal distribution of suicide in a southern European city...

Some neighborhood characteristics linked to social disorganization theory have been related to intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW). The study of other neighborhood‐level factors that may influence IPVAW risk, however, has received less attention. The aim of this study is to analyze the influence of university campuses on IPVAW risk. To...

Citrus black spot (CBS), caused by Phyllosticta citricarpa, is the main fungal disease affecting this crop and quarantine measures have been implemented. The role of climate as a limiting factor for the establishment and spread of CBS to new areas has been debated, but previous studies did not address the effects of spatial factors in the geographi...

Many ecological processes are measured as proportions and are spatially sampled. In all these cases the standard procedure has long been the transformation of proportional data with the arcsine square root or logit transformation, without considering the spatial correlation in any way. This paper presents a robust regression model to analyse this k...

Alcohol outlets have been associated with different social problems, such as crime, violence, intimate partner violence, and child maltreatment. The spatial analysis of neighborhood availability of alcohol outlets is key for better understanding of these influences. Most studies on the spatial distribution of alcohol outlets in the community have b...