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.

The technology transfer process moves research ideas from preliminary stages in research labs and universities to industrial products and startup companies. Such transfers significantly contribute to producing new computing platforms, services, and geospatial data products based on state-of-the-art research. To put technology transfer in perspective, this entry highlights key lessons learned through the process of transferring the Taghreed System from a research and development (R&D) lab to an industrial product. Taghreed is a system that supports scalable geospatial data analysis on social media microblogs data. Taghreed is primarily motivated by the large percentage of mobile microblogs users, over 80%, which has led to greater availability of geospatial content in microblogs beyond anytime in the digital data history. Taghreed has been commercialized and is powering a startup company that provides social media analytics based on full Twitter data archive.

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.

Social media streams have emerged as new sources to support various geospatial applications. However, traditional geospatial tools and systems lack the capacities to process such data streams, which are generated dynamically in extremely large volumes and with versatile contents. Therefore, innovative approaches and frameworks should be developed to detect an emerging event discussed over the social media, understand the extent, consequences of the event, as well as it time-evolving nature, and eventually discover useful patterns. In order to harness social media for geospatial applications, this entry introduces social media analytics technologies for harvesting, managing, mining, analyzing and visualizing the spatial, temporal, text, and network information of social media data.

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.