CLUES A Comprehensive Workflow for Integrating Geospatial Data in Biomedical Research

Why your surroundings matter for health

Where you live, work, and move each day quietly shapes your body and mind. Air quality, green spaces, traffic, heat waves, and social conditions all leave health footprints, yet most medical studies still focus on genes and lifestyle alone. This article introduces CLUES, an open-source workflow that makes it much easier for researchers to connect detailed environmental information with health data for millions of people, helping reveal how everyday surroundings influence disease risk and wellbeing.

Bringing place into health studies

Modern health studies routinely collect precise times and locations for participants, but turning that information into meaningful environmental exposure measures is technically daunting. Environmental data are scattered across many agencies, come in huge file sizes, and use different map systems and time scales. CLUES, which stands for Climate, Urbanicity, Environment and Society, acts as a one-stop workflow that automatically finds, downloads, and standardises a wide range of global geospatial datasets. It then links these to individual participants, so each person in a study can be assigned a personalised profile of environmental exposures over space and time.

What CLUES actually builds

CLUES pulls together information from several environmental domains that matter for health. These include how land is used, such as dense city areas, green spaces, forests, lakes, and coasts; weather and climate, such as temperature, rainfall, wind, and extremes; air pollution, including key gases and particles; and regional social conditions, such as population density, income, work, education, and access to transport or healthcare. All of these layers are harmonised into a consistent geospatial database. For each study participant, CLUES can then extract values at their locations and relevant times, producing an \

Citation: Jentsch, M., Polemiti, E., Renner, P. et al. CLUES A Comprehensive Workflow for Integrating Geospatial Data in Biomedical Research. Nat Commun 17, 4330 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73048-6

Keywords: environmental exposure, geospatial data, biomedical research, air pollution, climate and health