## 1 Introduction  
Schistosomiasis is one of the most prevalent neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), with more than 800 million people at risk and 200 million infected, the vast majority in sub-Saharan Africa [1; 2; 3]. The disease is caused by parasitic worms with a complex life cycle that includes two obligate hosts: a human host and a freshwater snail. People become infected through contact with water contaminated by a free-living stage of the parasite, called cercariae, shed by infected freshwater snails (Figure 1a). snails are infected by the other free-living stage of the parasites, miracidia, which emerge from eggs released in human urine, for _Schistosoma haematobium_, or feces, for _S. mansoni_. The current approach for schistosomiasisomiasis control in Africa is preventive chemotherapy in the form of mass drug administration (MDA), generally targeting school-aged children. While effective at reducing adult worm burdens, MDA does not kill juvenile worms nor does it prevent re-infection. Thus, drugs provide only temporary relief for people exposed to contaminated water for daily chores and water-based livelihoods, leaving entire communities in an endless cycle of drug treatment and re-infection [4]. For these reasons, schistosomiasisomiasis elimination remains a major public health challenge in many settings. Figure 1: **(a)** The life cycle of _Schistosoma_ spp. parasites. The adult worms live and reproduce sexually within the human host, releasing eggs into the environment that hatch and seek an intermediate freshwater snail host, where the larval stages of the worms develop via asexual reproduction. Cercariae are released from snails and seek human hosts, completing the life cycle. **(b)** Sampling aquatic environments for infected snails is physically demanding, time-intensive, and limited to accessible areas. Snails are found by sifting through thick vegetation, and later processed in the laboratory for parasitological data. Recent studies suggest that targeting the snails is one of the most effective ways to reduce schistosomiasisomiasis transmission [5; 6]. Unfortunately, despite decades of field studies on schistosomiasisomiasis, field methods for detecting snail populations have not improved upon standard manual search protocols. Manual sampling is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and, despite the effort, yields limited information to prioritize control strategies when it is necessary to identify transmission foci over large geographical areas. Snail distribution is patchy in space and time, and snail sampling is generally restricted to water depths and distances from shore that are safely accessed by field technicians stepping into potentially contaminated waters, whereas suitable snail habitat--and potential clusters of infective snails--can be found at great distances from shore (Figure 1b). This makes it difficult to accurately estimate snail abundance and distribution, and to scale estimations to an epidemiologically appropriate spatial scale. Consequently, disease control programs are generally deployed with limited knowledge of the spatial distribution of transmission risk for schistosomiasisomiasis. Thus, despite three decades and billions of dollars disbursed for human chemotherapy campaigns, the number of people infected with schistosomiasisomiasis has remained relatively unchanged [5]. Combating this debilitating disease requires improved methods for estimating disease risk and identifying transmission hot spots for targeted chemotherapy and environmental interventions, ultimately to maximize efficiency given that funding for disease control is often limited. In this study, we present an innovative method to map potential transmission foci that is based on the empirical association of snails with aquatic vegetation [7] and integrates satellite data with high-definition, low-cost drone imagery, and an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered computer vision technique termed'semantic segmentation' [8; 9].