Relationships between Ambrosia artemisiifolia sites and the physical and social environments of Montreal (Canada)

The aim of this paper is to present the results of a study on the relationship between the presence of Ambrosia artemisiifolia (Common ragweed) and the characteristics of physical and social environments of Montreal City. Standard multiple regression techniques allowed to create several models with good fitting values (R²>0.65) and statistically significant using the density of observations of Ambrosia artemisiifolia as the dependent variable. The present study, realized at the city block level, showed that the joint use of remote sensing imagery, land-use databases and socio-economic census data is very promising for the predictive cartography of Ambrosia artemisiifolia. To the authors knowledge it is the first such modeling attempt published yet