Geography Commons^™

Gis Librarians' Involvement In Critical Information Literacy Instruction, Melissa Chomintra, Pete E. Pascuzzi

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Critical information literacy (CIL) is a theory and practice that considers the sociopolitical dimensions of information and knowledge production. As the field of geospatial information evolves, equipping librarians with the skills to critically engage with geospatial information becomes integral to facilitating informed research, promoting spatial literacy, and strengthening the accessibility of geospatial data for their user communities. To understand geospatial data librarians’ current involvement in CIL, librarians were surveyed to examine if they incorporate CIL into their instruction, how they incorporate CIL into their instruction, and what are the benefits and challenges of doing so. The survey gathered both quantitative …

Flowing Progress: Transforming The Danube Through Infrastructure, Stefan Dorondel, Luminita Gatejel

Central European Studies

Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube Through Infrastructure focuses on how different political regimes and forms of governance have imagined and technologically transformed the most international river in the world. Multidisciplinary and drawing on methodologies of history, anthropology of infrastructure, and science, technology, and society, this collection explores the tensions between the river and its natural pulses, the humans that populate its floodplains, state agencies, and infrastructure. The book engages the concept of disturbance to point out the circular and spiraling dynamics between hydrological processes and technopolitical and economic practices. Disturbance denotes a specific type of long-term dynamic between human attempts …

Mapping Responsible Workflows For Geospatial Data Science: Developing The I-Guide Data Ethics Toolkit, Peter T. Darch, Kyra M. Abrams, Ivan Y M Kong

I-GUIDE Forum

AI workflows in geospatial data science offer significant societal benefits but raise ethical, transparency, and reproducibility challenges. Current ethical frameworks and tools are often hard to integrate into daily research practice. This paper introduces the I-GUIDE Data Ethics Toolkit (DET), a lightweight suite designed for users of the NSF-funded Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE). Based on a longitudinal mixed-methods study, including surveys, interviews, and observations, we identified five design priorities: usability, anticipatory planning, distributed responsibility, comprehensive coverage, and policy compliance. We integrated existing AI and data research lifecycles into an eight-stage I-GUIDE Research Lifecycle, serving …

Evaluating The Evaluation Matrices: Integrating Spatial Assessment In Geospatial Ai Model Training And Evaluation, Fangzheng Lyu

I-GUIDE Forum

This paper examines the limitations of current evaluation metrics in GeoAI. Through two case studies on deep learning models—a building detection classification problem and a remote sensing image fusion regression problem—this paper demonstrates how traditional statistical evaluation matrices alone can be misleading in geospatial problems. The findings indicate that traditional metrics (e.g., RMSE, MAE) used in current GeoAI models can have difficulty capturing the spatial dimensions inherent to geospatial problems. This paper suggests that the model evaluation process in GeoAI should move beyond traditional evaluation matrices by integrating spatial thinking throughout the modeling pipeline—not only incorporating spatial accuracy in model …

Expanding Access To Cybergis-Compute Through Support For Heterogeneous Workflows, Alexander C. Michels, Ian Zhang, Anand Padmanabhan, John Speaks, Rebecca Vandewalle, Shaowen Wang

I-GUIDE Forum

CyberGIS-Compute is a geospatial middleware tool designed to lower technical barriers to High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources. It provides end-users with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for submitting models to HPC and allows model developers to contribute their workflows by adding a manifest to their repositories. However, the simplification of the user interface and streamlining of model contribution have unintentionally limited the scope of models that could be run on CyberGIS-Compute. In this paper, we discuss recent developments to the CyberGIS-Compute project that are aimed at supporting a wider variety of workflows including performance enhancements, supporting additional configuration options for jobs, …

Assessing Vulnerabilities Associated With High-Risk Dams In Utah, Courtney Flint Dr., Michael Englert, Upmanu Lall Dr.

I-GUIDE Forum

Across the United States, the age of dam infrastructure presents a substantial threat. The potential for structural failure associated with these aging dams is exacerbated by increased climate uncertainty and the threat of dam overtopping due to extreme and prolonged precipitation events. These compound threats place downstream areas at pronounced risk. These downstream areas vary widely. Some are relatively free of vulnerable elements, while others have a complex mix of infrastructure, populations, and ecologically important elements. This paper highlights the risk situation associated with aging dams and hydroclimatic extremes, the methodological and geospatial challenges and opportunities associated with mapping the …

Recent U.S. Government Policy Literature On Critical And Strategic Minerals, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Critical and strategic minerals have become increasingly important in U.S. government civilian and military policymaking in recent years. This is demonstrated by the heavy use of such minerals in many critical civilian and military infrastructures. This work will discuss how this subject has been addressed in laws, presidential documents, and works by government agencies along with congressional oversight committees and support agencies. It will stress how the United States is heavily dependent on strategic minerals from adversarial foreign countries such as China and will examine U.S. efforts to increase its ability to produce such materials in the United States by …

Canadian Security Intelligence Service (Csis), Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

April 24, 2025 presentation for Canada's GovInfo Day Spring 2025 hosted by Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and Internet Archive Canada. Provides information about the publicly available information resources produced by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) which is the Canadian Government's foremost national intelligence agency. Provides information about this agency's statutory organization, types of publicly available reports they produce, information about other Canadian government intelligence agencies, and parliamentary oversight of Canadian government intelligence operations. Lists additional resources for finding information about CSIS and explains the benefits of having access to these resources for users.

Conducting Effective Literature Searches And Writing Strong Abstracts, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

This invited presentation for students at Poland's War Studies University communicates ideas on how Ph.D. students at this institution can enhance their research quality. Specific content includes formulating your research question, determining research aims and methodology, reviewing a research question checklist, understanding the meaning of search terms you propose to utilize, devising effective search strategies, consulting multiple varieties of information resources from multiple countries, finding gaps in literature, being able to distinguish between nuances in literature and data, writing succinct abstracts, and enhancing the clarity of your prose.

Designing Field Courses To Teach Few Concepts Effectively, Eunice L. Blavascunas

National Collaborative for Research on Food, Energy, and Water Education (NC-FEW)

How do students learn complex systems FEW concepts in field courses? An overview of field-course practices in the Yakima Valley of Washington State.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence To Interpret Spatially-Explicit Impacts Of Future Climate Change On Species Distribution, Lei Song, Amy E. Frazier, Peter Kedron, Diogo S. A. Araujo, Diyang Cui, Brian J. Enquist, Brian Maitner, Cory Merow, Gabriel M. Moulatlet, Efthymios I. Nikolopoulos, Patrick R. Roehrdanz

I-GUIDE Forum

Biodiversity is essential for maintaining ecosystem balance and functionality, providing vital services such as climate regulation. The rapid decline in biodiversity, driven by habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, and climate change, poses significant threats to ecosystems. Climate change, in particular, is fundamentally altering habitats, leading to shifts in species distributions. However, existing research often lacks decomposed contribution analyses, particularly spatially, for a changing individual environmental attributes when modeling species distribution as an aggregate result of all factors and their interactions. Such analyses are crucial for identifying climate refugia and prioritizing conservation efforts. Taking endangered mammal species as an example, this study …

Statistical Downscaling Of Climate Datasets With Deep Generative Model And Bayesian Inference, Guiye Li, Guofeng Cao

I-GUIDE Forum

Facing the challenges of global climate change, precise and high spatial resolution climate data are crucial and in pressing need for scientific research and analysis. However, most existing datasets are only available with very coarse spatial resolution and demand large-scale resolution enhancement. Meanwhile, climate datasets own much more intricate textures than natural images. Statistical downscaling or super-resolution (SR) with the deep-learning-based generative model might be a promising approach to address these challenges. It is worth noting that a learned Bayesian reconstruction with generative models (L-BRGM) method was proposed recently. The proposed Bayesian deep learning framework employs a single pre-trained generative …

Understanding Complex Socio-Environmental Systems With Spatial Agent-Based Models, Rebecca C. Vandewalle, Alexander Michels, Furqan Baig, Shaowen Wang

I-GUIDE Forum

Our increasingly connected world is faced with complex socio-environmental problems (e.g., biodiversity loss, climate change, and food insecurity). Tackling these problems requires cross- disciplinary approaches that examine the problems based on synergistic spatial and system thinking. Spatial Agent-Based Models (SABMs) represent a powerful approach to understanding complex socio-environmental systems. However, research on SABMs and associated complex problem solving face grand challenges that must be overcome to effectively unleash the power of SABMs enabled by cyber-based geographic information science and systems (cyberGIS). This paper describes four such grand challenges —reproducibility, scalability, communication, and accessibility. Resolving these challenges will enable new spatial …

Communicating Uncertainty And Cataloging Bias In Spatial Data Science Education, Peter Kedron, Jiahua Chen

I-GUIDE Forum

Uncertainty is an unavoidable part of any spatial analysis, which makes quantifying and communicating uncertainty a requirement of any spatial data science study. However, current curricula leave students understanding the importance of uncertainty and concerned about potential bias, but without an actionable framework to improve their workflows or inferences. We propose a framework rooted in Bloom’s Taxonomy for introducing these concepts to spatial data science students.

A Convergence Framework For Integrating Cybergis Education And Research On I-Guide Platform, Fangzheng Lyu, Furqan Baig, Yunfan Kang, Erick Li, Anand Padmanabhan, Shaowen Wang

I-GUIDE Forum

This paper described Data with Notebooks as a convergence framework for integrating cyberGIS education and research on the I-GUIDE Platform. The I-GUIDE Platform provides rich geospatial data and computing resources and adheres to FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) data principles. The framework enhances these capabilities by harnessing scalable and reproducible geospatial analytics. Specifically, this framework supports the development of interactive cyberGIS education and research Jupyter Notebooks centered around geospatial datasets. A case study demonstrates the application of the framework, showing six cyberGIS research notebooks and four cyberGIS education notebooks based on a Twitter dataset. The case study and underlying …

Building Blocks For Geospatial Software Education Using The I-Guide Platform, Rebecca C. Vandewalle, Alexander Michels, Zhiyuan Li, Nattapon Jaroenchai, Shaowen Wang

I-GUIDE Forum

By combining advanced cyberinfrastructure with geospatial analysis capabilities and resources in an accessible online environment, the I-GUIDE Platform has great potential for geospatial computing focused education. However, learning occurs in different settings and contexts, both formal and informal. For I-GUIDE Platform to be successful, it should have the flexibility to support a variety of educational needs. In this paper, we argue for an expanded set of front-end building blocks to support diverse education and research use-cases, building on existing cyberGIS capabilities and Jupyter backend. We draw from experience working with the CyberGISX platform as an education tool in different learning …

Tradeoffs Of Generalization, Kyra M. Abrams, Peter T. Darch

I-GUIDE Forum

Models used in geospatial data science are often built and optimized for a specific local context, such as a particular location at a point in time. However, upon publication, these models may be generalized beyond this context, reused in research simulating or predicting other times and places. Without sufficient information or documentation, bias embedded in these models can in turn result in bias in the reuser’s research outputs. Drawing on a long-term qualitative case study of aging dams researchers and developers of models used by these researchers, we find significant documentation gaps. We combine a literature-based genealogy with interviews with …

Data-Intensive Convergence Science For Analyzing Place-Based Spatial Accessibility, Alexander C. Michels, Shaowen Wang

I-GUIDE Forum

Place-based spatial accessibility is a critical tool for measuring the health, resilience, and sustainability of communities. Accessibility methods are employed by a wide range of fields to measure access to food, healthcare, infrastructure and other critical needs. While measures of access are relatively simple, they attempt to capture the complexities of human mobility and spatial decision-making to assess how well populations are served by the infrastructure, resources, and services at their disposal. This paper describes four key areas where data-intensive convergence science can revolutionize our understanding of place-based spatial accessibility by addressing issues of scale, spatial impedance, diversity, and accessibility. …

Food Tourism And Storytelling In The Scandinavian North, Kajsa G. Åberg

GSTC Academic Symposium - In conjunction with the GSTC Global Conference

The relation between place, food and tourism is gaining interest from actors in both private and public sectors in the Nordic countries. Food is discussed as potential for product development and image building, based on reasoning on how value may be added through geographical food branding. However, food and drink may also be regarded as a tangible way to communicate local ways of life and as bearers of symbolism and values. The process of commercialization is therefore closely linked to aspects of control and respect, elements found in the criteria section on socio-cultural sustainability in the Global Sustainable Tourism Council …

Estimating Effects Of Tourism Using Multiple Data Sources: The Miranda Tool As Part Of A Spatial Decision Support System For Sustainable Destination Development, Tobias Heldt

GSTC Academic Symposium - In conjunction with the GSTC Global Conference

Planning for sustainable mobility and destination development in rural areas is increasingly important when tourism grows in numbers. A key to address the challenge of transformation and adaptation of local communities to mitigate adverse effects in seasonal peak hours like traffic congestion, power failure, waste management and sewage flooding, is to properly estimate the number of visitors to a destination.

The problem of estimating tourism numbers is a known challenge since, for example, guest nights statistics are in-complete and non-commercial lodging (sharing solutions) are increasing. Recently, the promising utilization of mobile phone data has emerged as a means to estimate …

Sustainable Hospitality Workforce - A Study Of Decency And Dignity In Hotel Housekeeping, Maria Thulemark, Susanna Heldt Cassel Prof., Tara Duncan Prof.

GSTC Academic Symposium - In conjunction with the GSTC Global Conference

Key Words: hospitality work, decent work, sustainable work, working participant observation, embodied intersectionality

Evaluating The Environmental Impacts Of U.S. Historical Oil Spill Incidents, Yiming Liu, Hua Cai

Graduate Industrial Research Symposium

Exposure to risks associated with the production and usage of products, particularly oil, poses significant threats to both ecological systems and human health. Notable examples include the Gulf War Oil Spill (1991) and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill (2010). However, numerous smaller-scale oil spills, which collectively contribute to substantial oil releases, often remain overlooked. To fill this gap, our study first developed a detailed oil spill incidents database, covering 1967 to 2023. We quantified the released amount (RA) of oil spills recorded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Subsequently, we utilized life cycle impact indicators in ReCiPe to …

Monitoring Of Caucasus Heritage Sites Facing Cultural Genocide, Peyton Edelbrock

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Geopolitics In Recent U.S. Professional Military Reading Lists, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Professional military reading lists have existed for a long time in the U.S. military and in other national militaries. They are frequently updated and intended to enhance the professional knowledge of military professionals in areas ranging from cultural awareness, ethics, leadership, international relations, military history and military operations, and areas of expertise considered essential to successfully executing the operations of their military service branch. These lists are prepared by the leadership organizations of these armed services such as the Air Force Chief of Staff, U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff, Chief of Naval Operations, and Marine Corps Commandant. Such readings are …

Complex Impacts Of Wars On Global Sustainable Development In A Metacoupled World, Qutu Jiang, Zhenci Xu, Yuanzheng Cui, Jianguo Liu

I-GUIDE Forum

Wars and armed conflicts have had profound impacts on local and global sustainable development in an interconnected world. However, evidence on the impacts of wars is fragmented and little attention has been paid to the impacts on the 17 UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a unifying framework for achieving global sustainable development. This perspective synthesizes the scattered information to provide a holistic analysis and highlight the applications of remote sensing in assessing the impacts of wars on global sustainable development in a metacoupling world. Wars have complex impacts on all 17 SDGs, which cascade beyond conflict zones and spillover to …

Decentralized Infrastructure For Reproducible And Replicable Geographical Science, Joseph Holler, Peter Kedron

I-GUIDE Forum

The I-GUIDE cyberinfrastructure project for convergence science is a leading example of the possibilities the geospatial data revolution holds for scientific discovery. However, rapidly expanding access to increasingly complex data sources and methods of computational analysis also presents a challenge to the research community. With more data and more potential analyses, researchers face the possibility of jeopardizing the inferential power of convergence research with selection bias. Well-designed infrastructure that can flexibly guide researchers as they record and track decisions in their research designs opens a path to mitigating this problem, while also expanding the reproducibility and replicability of research. Much …

Streamlined Hpc Environments With Cvmfs And Cybergis-Compute, Alexander C. Michels, Mit Kotak, Anand Padmanabhan, Shaowen Wang

I-GUIDE Forum

High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources provide the potential for complex, large-scale modeling and analysis, fueling scientific progress over the last few decades, but these advances are not equally distributed across disciplines. Those in computational disciplines are often trained to have the necessary technical skills to utilize HPC (e.g. familiarity with the terminal), but many disciplines face technical hurdles when trying to apply HPC resources to their work. This unequal familiarity with HPC is increasingly a problem as cross-discipline teams work to tackle critical interdisciplinary issues like climate change and sustainability. CyberGIS-Compute is middle-ware designed to democratize to HPC services with the …

Geospatial Data Integration Middleware For Exploratory Analytics Addressing Regional Natural Resource Grand Challenges In The Us Mountain West, Shannon Albeke, Nicholas Case, Samantha Ewers, Jeffrey Hamerlinck, William Kirkpatrick, Jerod Merkle, Luke Todd

I-GUIDE Forum

This paper describes CyberGIS-based research and development aimed at improving geospatial data integration and visual analytics to better understand the impact of regional climate change on water availability in the U.S. Rocky Mountains. Two Web computing applications are presented. DEVISE - Derived Environmental Variability Indices Spatial Extractor, streamlines utilization of environmental data for better-informed wildlife decisions by biologists and game managers. The WY-Adapt platform aims to enhance predictive understanding of climate change impacts on water availability through two modules: “Current Conditions” and “Future Scenarios”. It integrates high-resolution models of the biophysical environment and human interactions, providing a robust framework for …

An Agent-Based Modeling Approach To Spatial Accessibility, Alexander C. Michels, Shaowen Wang

I-GUIDE Forum

Place-based spatial accessibility represents the ability of populations within geographic units to access goods and services, and thus is an important indicator for sustainable development. Existing spatial accessibility models treat population as simply demand, calculating statistics or optimizing average cost for the population within each geographic unit, rather than modeling individual decisions. This paper proposes AgentAccess, a general-purpose Agent-Based Model (ABM) for spatial accessibility analysis. An ABM framework brings us closer to reality by simulating individual and imperfect decision-making. We introduce the model and compare its results against existing spatial accessibility models using a case study of hospital beds in …

The Challenge Of Misclassification Error In The European Union’S Deforestation Regulation, Caleb T. Gallemore

I-GUIDE Forum

The European Union’s Regulation 2023/1115, which requires firms to undertake significant due diligence efforts to minimize the import of deforestation-linked commodities into the Union, relies heavily on cutting-edge geospatial technologies. While several studies of zero-deforestation supply chain efforts have pointed to the political and logistical challenges such initiatives face, there has been less consideration of the role that the measurement errors that are unavoidable in geospatial technologies might affect emerging zero-deforestation governance systems. Using information on misclassification error rates for forest areas from 20 recent validation studies of global land-cover datasets, I simulate the misclassification risks we might expect from …