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DA-18 - GIS&T and Disaster Management

Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIS&T) has a long-running tradition of using spatially-oriented methodologies and representational techniques such as cartography and mapping to address hazards and disasters. This tradition remains important as ever as global society faces newer and more complex challenges resulting from climate change and new challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic. GIS&T has become an invisible technology within the disaster management cycle of planning and preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. Spatial technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing techniques, spatial data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are now widespread and pervasive. Despite these advancements, there is more that can be done to incorporate GIS&T perspectives into disaster management. In this article, we outline important conceptual ideas to consider on the use of GIS&T for disaster management, disaster management organizations that use GIS&T, and practical information to orient newcomers to this exciting and important interdisciplinary combination.

DA-13 - GIS&T in Criminal Justice and Law Enforcement

Linking crime and place has been the objective of crime mapping since the early nineteenth century. Contemporary scholars have since investigated spatio-temporal crime patterns to explain why crime concentrates in certain places during certain times. Collectively, this body of research has identified various environmental and situational factors that contribute to the formation of crime hot spots and spawned widespread crime prevention and reduction strategies commonly referred to as place-based policing.  Environmental criminology guides the bulk of this crime-and-place research and provides a means for interpreting place and crime. The chapter details theories behind place-based policing, examples of place-based policing strategies that leverage geographic information science and its associated technologies (GIS&T), and relevant data visualization tools used by law enforcement to implement place-based strategies to address crime.

DA-47 - GIS&T in International Affairs

GIS applications within the International Affairs domain are vast, and they include: the analysis and representation of flows and stops of people, resources, and capital across borders, humanitarian assistance, war, conflict, and surveillance, and analysis of border-crossing spatial phenomena such as natural disasters and climate change.

Due to the wide range of potential thematic data, GIS for International Affairs should be a balance of hands-on practical application skills and critical thinking about spatial concepts of scale, boundaries, borders, and flows. GIS scholars and practitioners in this domain should learn to think critically about how and where spatial data is created, the people and cultures impacted by spatial data-driven decisions, and the equity of who is involved in such decisions. Students should learn how spatial data is created, how major datasets in the field are built, and how to design datasets during fieldwork for robust spatial analysis. Through all of this, critical thinking around which people and places are counted and represented should be maintained.

GIS in International Affairs must always contend with the colonial history of cartography, seeking now to understand how modern-day spatial technologies are always constituted by and embedded in constructions of power.

DA-39 - GIS&T and Recreation Planning and Management

Human interactions with each other and the environment are intrinsically connected to the opportunities and limitations of where we live and where we are able to go. The connections between places of origin, destinations, and travel routes mean that recreation and tourism inherently rely on spatial concepts of place and human-environment interactions. Tourism and recreation are major economic drivers, yet these sectors are constantly evolving as people embrace different ways to travel and recreate and environmental and socio-economic conditions change. Advances in GIS technology and computing ability are shaping the questions asked and tools used by researchers to understand the drivers and impacts of recreation. In this entry, we highlight current research and approaches used to characterize access to green spaces in urban areas, to understand recreational behaviors and tourist preferences through social media, to map landscape aesthetics and cultural ecosystem services, and to quantify the impacts of tourism and recreation on protected areas. Starting with urban areas and local extents and moving to protected areas and regional processes, we summarize scholarship focused on different types of places and occurring across different extents and scales to provide a digest of current research.

DA-30 - GIS&T and Landscape Ecology

Landscape ecology is a transdisciplinary science dedicated to the study of the interactions among landscape heterogeneity, humans, and natural system. Since its inception in the mid-20th Century, landscape ecology has been strongly intertwined with spatial technologies, from aerial photography to modern space-borne sensors. Satellite-based remote sensing is among the primary data sources for contemporary landscape ecology analysis, while geographic information systems provide tools to analyze the spatial configurations of satellite derived classifications, simulate landscapes and species distributions, quantify landscape change, and elucidate the reciprocal relationship between spatial patterns and ecological processes. Additionally, global navigation satellite systems, such as GPS, Galileo, and GLONASS, augment these datasets and may be used for data collection to aid landscape ecology research. Emerging geospatial technologies, such as unoccupied aerial systems and micro- and nanosatellites, also have a role to play in landscape ecology.

DA-46 - Computational Geography

Computational Geography emerged in the 1980s in response to the reductionist limitations of early GIS software, which inhibited deep analyses of rich geographic data. Today, Computational Geography continues to integrate a wide range of domains to facilitate spatial analyses that require computational resources or ontological paradigms beyond that made available in traditional GIS software packages. These include novel approaches for the mass creation of geospatial data, large-scale database design for the effective storage and querying of spatial identifiers (i.e., distributed spatial databases), and methodologies which enable simulations and/or analysis in the context of large-scale, frequently near-real-time, spatially-explicit sources of information. The topics studied within Computational Geography directly enable many of the world’s largest public databases, including Google Maps and Open Street Map (OSM), as well as many modern analytic pipelines designed to study human behavior with the integration of large volumes of location information (e.g., mobile phone data) with other geospatial sources (e.g., satellite imagery).