ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf., Volume 11, Issue 9 (September 2022) – 38 articles

Climate change and overpopulation have led to an increase in water demands worldwide. As a result, land subsidence due to groundwater extraction and water level decline is causing damage to communities in arid and semiarid regions. The agricultural plain of Samalghan in Iran has recently experienced wide areas of land subsidence, which is hypothesized to be caused by groundwater overexploitation. This hypothesis was assessed by estimating the amount of subsidence that occurred in the Samalghan plain using DInSAR based on an analysis of 25 Sentinel-1 descending SAR images over 6 years. To assess the influence of water level changes on this phenomenon, groundwater level maps were produced, and their relationship with land subsidence was evaluated. Results showed that one major cause of the subsidence in the Samalghan plain was groundwater overexploitation, with the highest average land subsidence occurring in 2019 (34 cm) and the lowest in 2015 and 2018 (18 cm). Twelve Sentinel-1 ascending images were used for relative validation of the DInSAR processing. The correlation value varied from 0.69 to 0.89 (an acceptable range). Finally, the aquifer behavior was studied, and changes in cultivation patterns and optimal utilization of groundwater resources were suggested as practical strategies to control the current situation. Full article

The large-scale variation issue in high-resolution aerial images significantly lowers the accuracy of segmenting small objects. For a deep-learning-based semantic segmentation model, the main reason is that the deeper layers generate high-level semantics over considerably large receptive fields, thus improving the accuracy for large objects but ignoring small objects. Although the low-level features extracted by shallow layers contain small-object information, large-object information has predominant effects. When the model, using low-level features, is trained, the large objects push the small objects aside. This observation motivates us to propose a novel reverse difference mechanism (RDM). The RDM eliminates the predominant effects of large objects and highlights small objects from low-level features. Based on the RDM, a novel semantic segmentation method called the reverse difference network (RDNet) is designed. In the RDNet, a detailed stream is proposed to produce small-object semantics by enhancing the output of RDM. A contextual stream for generating high-level semantics is designed by fully accumulating contextual information to ensure the accuracy of the segmentation of large objects. Both high-level and small-object semantics are concatenated when the RDNet performs predictions. Thus, both small- and large-object information is depicted well. Two semantic segmentation benchmarks containing vital small objects are used to fully evaluate the performance of the RDNet. Compared with existing methods that exhibit good performance in segmenting small objects, the RDNet has lower computational complexity and achieves 3.9–18.9% higher accuracy in segmenting small objects. Full article

Geographic relation completion contributes greatly to improving the quality of large-scale geographic knowledge graphs (GeoKGs). However, the internal features of a GeoKG used in large-scale GeoKGs embedding are often limited by the weak connectivity between geographic entities (geo-entities). If there is no proper choice in the method of external semantic enhancement, this will often interfere with the representation and learning of the KG. Therefore, we here propose a geographic relation (geo-relation) prediction model based on multi-layer similarity enhanced networks for geo-relations completion (MSEN-GRP). The MSEN-GRP comprises three parts: enhancer, encoder, and decoder. The enhancer constructs semantic, spatial, structural, and attribute-similarity networks for geo-entities, which can explicitly and effectively enhance the implicit semantic associations between existing geo-entities. The encoder can obtain the long path relation dependency characteristics of geo-entities using a mixed-path sampling strategy and can support different optimization schemes for external semantic enhancement. Geo-relations prediction experiments show that the mean reciprocal ranking of this method is significantly higher than those of the traditional TransE DisMult and methods, and Hits@10 is improved by up to 57.57%. Furthermore, the spatial-similarity network has the most significant enhancement effect on geo-relations prediction. The proposed method provides a new way to perform relation completion in sparse GeoKGs. Full article

The distribution and sentiment characteristics of tourists directly reflect the state of tourism development, and are an important reference for tourists to choose scenic areas. Sensing the tourist distributions and their sentiment variations can provide decision support for the development planning of scenic areas. In this study, we crawled tourist social media data to explore tourist distribution characteristics and the patterns of tourist sentiment variations. First, we used web crawlers to obtain social media data (tourist comment data) and the location data of China’s 5A scenic areas from the Ctrip tourism platform. Second, SnowNLP (Simplified Chinese Text Processing) was optimized and used to classify the sentiment of tourists’ comments and calculate the sentiment value. Finally, we mined the distribution characteristics of tourists in 5A scenic areas and the spatio-temporal variations in tourists’ sentiments. The results show that: (1) There is a negative correlation between the number of tourists to China’s 5A scenic areas and tourist sentiment: the number of tourists is highest in October and lowest in March, while tourist sentiment is highest in March and lowest in October. (2) The spatio-temporal distribution of tourists has obvious aggregation: temporally mainly in July, August and October, spatially mainly in the Yangtze River Delta city cluster, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei city cluster, and Guanzhong Plain city cluster. (3) Tourist sentiment cold/hot spots vary significantly by city clusters: the Yangtze River Delta city cluster is always a sentiment hot spot; the northern city cluster has more sentiment cold spots; the central city cluster varies significantly during the year; the southwestern city cluster has more sentiment hot spots. Full article

With the constant deepening of research on marine environment simulation and information expression, there are higher and higher requirements for the sense of the reality of ocean data visualization results and the real-time interaction in the visualization process. Aiming at the challenges of 3D interactive key technology and GPU-based visualization algorithm technology, we developed a visualization system for large-scale 3D marine environmental data. The system realizes submarine terrain rendering, contour line visualization, isosurface visualization, section visualization, volume visualization and flow field visualization. In order to manage and express the data in the system, we developed a data management module, which can effectively integrate a large number of marine environmental data and manage them effectively. We developed a series of data analysis functions for the system, such as point query and line query, local analysis and multi-screen collaboration, etc. These functions can effectively improve the data analysis efficiency of users and meet the data analysis needs in multiple scenarios. The marine environmental data visualization system developed in this paper can efficiently and intuitively simulate and display the nature and changing process of marine water environmental factors. Full article

The mitigation of urban heat islands (UHIs) is crucial for promoting the sustainable development of urban areas. Geographic information systems (GISs) together with satellite-derived data are powerful tools for investigating the spatiotemporal distribution of UHIs. Depending on the availability of data and the geographic scale of the analysis, different methodologies can be adopted. Here, we show a complete open source GIS-based methodology based on satellite-driven data for investigating and mapping the impact of the UHI on the heat-related elderly risk (HERI) in the Functional Urban Area of Padua. Thermal anomalies in the territory were mapped by modelling satellite data from Sentinel-3. After a socio-demographic analysis, the HERI was mapped according to five levels of risk. The highest vulnerability levels were localised within the urban area and in three municipalities near Padua, which represent about 20% of the entire territory investigated. In these municipalities, a percentage of elderly people over 20%, a thermal anomaly over 2.4 °C, and a HERI over 0.65 were found. Based on these outputs, it is possible to define nature-based solutions for reducing the UHI phenomenon and promote a sustainable development of cities. Stakeholders can use the results of these investigations to define climate and environmental policies. Full article

This article elaborates on the quality issue in cartographic generalization of linear and area features focusing on the assessment of shape preservation. Assessing shape similarity in generalization is still a topic where further research is required. In the study presented here, shape description and matching techniques are investigated and analyzed, a procedure for choosing generalization parameters suitable for line and area features depiction is described and a quality model is developed for the assessment and verification of the generalization results. Based on the procedure developed, cartographers will be confident that the generalization of linear and area features is appropriate for a specific scale of portrayal fulfilling on the same time a basic requirement in generalization, that of shape preservation. The results of the procedure developed are based on the processing and successful generalization of a large number of different line and area features that is supported by a software environment developed in Python programming language. Full article

Assessing park accessibility plays an essential role in providing rational recreational services for residents in a city. The perceptions and comments of residents are also important nonspatial factors for accessibility. However, there are few accessibility studies that are combined with public perceptions. Addressing this deficit, this study proposes a perception-based, multi-travel mode, two-step floating catchment area (PM2SFCA) method to calculate park accessibility. First, we quantified the selection probability of residents to parks by integrating the Huff model and the people’s perceptions towards parks. Next, under four travel modes (walking, biking, driving and public transport), we combined the Huff model and the two-step floating catchment area method to compute park accessibility. Furthermore, the Gini coefficient and the Pearson correlation coefficient were used to illustrate the proposed method compared with the traditional E2SFCA method. Based on the above, taking the area of Beijing within the Fifth Ring Road as a study area, this paper facilitated the accessibility computation. The results indicated that the spatial distribution patterns of accessibility differed greatly under the four travel modes. Even under the same travel mode, there was an uneven accessibility distribution. Areas with high accessibility were mainly concentrated in the north, and some marginal areas also presented higher accessibility to parks. The comparative analysis results suggest that our proposed method for accessibility measurements alleviates the underestimation and overestimation of accessibility values obtained by a traditional method such as the center and edge of the study area. The research explores a new research perspective for measuring park accessibility. Furthermore, this study offers better guidance for policymakers trying to optimize park spatial distribution issues. Full article

Road intersections are essential to road networks. How to precisely recognize road intersections based on GPS data is still challenging in intelligent transportation systems. Road intersection recognition involves detecting intersections and recognizing its scope. There are few works on intersections’ scope recognition. The existing methods always focus on road intersection detection. It includes two parts: one is selecting turning points from GPS data and extracting their geometric features, another is clustering them into center coordinates of road intersections. However, the accuracy of road intersection detection still has improvement room due to two drawbacks: (1) Besides geometric features, spatial features explored from GPS data and the interactions among all features are also important to represent intersections’ semantics more accurately, and (2) How to capture the points around intersections for clustering has great impact on the accuracy of intersection detection. To solve the preceding problems, we propose a novel approach for road intersection recognition via combining a classification model and clustering algorithm based on GPS data, which involves detecting the center coordinate and computing the radius of the intersection. Firstly, we distil geometric features and spatial features from historical GPS points. These features are inputted into the Extreme Deep Factorization Machine (xDeepFM) model which is applied for capturing the GPS points nearby road intersections. Secondly, the preceding points are clustered into center coordinates of road intersections by the Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise algorithm (DBSCAN). Thirdly, we present a new method of radius computing by integrating Delaunay triangulation with circle shape structure. Experiments are carried out on the GPS data of Chengdu, China. Compared with some state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves higher accuracy on road intersection recognition based on GPS data. The precision, recall, and f-measure of our proposed center coordinates detection method are respectively 99.0%, 92.7%, and 95.8% when the matching area’s radius is 30 m. Moreover, the error of the proposed radius calculation method is less than 26.5%. Full article

The rapid development of the economy promotes the increasing of interactions between cities and forms complex networks. Many scholars have explored the structural characteristics of urban spatial interaction networks in China and have conducted spatio-temporal analyzes. However, scholars have mainly focused on the perspective of static networks and have not understood the dynamic spatial interaction patterns of Chinese cities. Therefore, this paper proposes a research framework to explore the urban dynamic spatial interaction patterns. Firstly, we establish a dynamic urban spatial interaction network according to monthly migration data. Then, the dynamic community detection algorithm, combined with the Louvain and Jaccard matching method, is used to obtain urban communities and their dynamic events. We construct event vectors for each urban community and use hierarchical clustering to cluster event vectors to obtain different types of spatial interaction patterns. Finally, we divide the urban dynamic interaction into three urban spatial interaction modes: fixed spatial interaction pattern, long-term spatial interaction pattern, and short-term spatial interaction pattern. According to the results, we find that the cities in well-developed areas (eastern China) and under-developed areas (northwestern China) mostly show fixed spatial interaction patterns and long-term spatial interaction patterns, while the cities in moderately developed areas (central and western China) often show short-term spatial interaction patterns. The research results and conclusions of this paper reveal the inter-monthly urban spatial interaction patterns in China, provide theoretical support for the policy making and development planning of urban agglomeration construction, and contribute to the coordinated development of national and regional cities. Full article

The rail transit station realm is an important urban spatial node that carries various behavioral activities and multiple functions. In order to accurately identify the spatial and temporal distribution of population activities and functional facilities in the rail transit station realm and understand the dynamic influence relationship between them, this paper takes four different types of stations of Xi’an Metro Line 2 as the research object, using real-time positioning data to represent population activities and points of interest (POIs) to represent functional facilities. An analytical framework combining the spatial point pattern identification technique and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model is proposed. The results show that (1) there is spatial and temporal heterogeneity in the population activities in the rail transit station realm; the density distribution of population activities in different time periods shows the characteristic of clustering within 500 m of the station, regardless of working days or off days; (2) the distribution of shopping service POI, catering service POI, and living service POI in different station realms shows the feature of clustering around the stations; (3) the catering POI, living POI, shopping POI and transportation POI have positive attraction to population activities in different time periods; the constructed OLS model can basically explain the influence relationship between various functional facilities and population activities in all time periods. The conclusions can help city managers understand the spatial and temporal distribution and intrinsic mechanisms of population activities and functional facilities from a microscopic perspective and provide an effective decision-making basis for optimizing the allocation of functional resources in the station realm. Full article

The possibility offered by the current technology to collect and store data sets regarding public places located on the Earth globe is posing new challenges, as far as the integration of these data sets is concerned. Analysts usually need to perform such an integration from scratch, without performing complex and long preprocessing or data-cleaning tasks, as well as without performing training activities that require tedious and long labeling of data; furthermore, analysts now have to deal with the popular JSON format and with data sets stored within JSON document stores. This paper demonstrates that a methodology based on soft integration (i.e., data integration performed through soft computing and fuzzy sets) can now be effectively applied from scratch, through the J-CO Framework, which is a stand-alone tool devised to process JSON data sets stored within JSON document stores, possibly by performing soft querying on data sets. Specifically, the paper provides the following contributions: (1) It presents a soft-computing technique for integrating data sets describing public places, without any preliminary pre-processing, cleaning and training, which can be applied from scratch; (2) it presents current capabilities for soft integration of JSON data sets, provided by the J-CO Framework; (3) it demonstrates the effectiveness of the soft integration technique; (4) it shows how a stand-alone tool able to support soft computing (as the J-CO Framework) can be effective and efficient in performing data-integration tasks from scratch. Full article

The urban fringe area is a discontinuous spatial phenomenon that refers to the urban-rural interlacing zone which is undergoing urbanization on the fringe of the core built-up area of a large city after the emergence of industrialization. Dynamic, ambiguous, and complex interlacing of various types of lands make urban planners and managers fuzzy about the spatial scope of the urban fringe and it is difficult to control its evolution patterns scientifically. Based on remote sensing data from 2000 to 2020, the range of Wuhan’s urban fringe was extracted from the surface impermeability ratio mutation points, landscape flocculation, and population density. On this basis, the dynamic evolution characteristics of land-use and landscape patterns in the urban fringe area of Wuhan City were analyzed by using dynamic change and landscape pattern index analysis. The results show that: Wuhan City shows a clear “urban core area-urban fringe area-rural hinterland” circle structure, and the urban fringe area continuously extends to the rural hinterland. Moreover, most of the rural hinterland, in the process of moving to the urban core area, has gone through the process of the urban fringe. By comparison with other cities, it is found that the expansion of large cities is generally influenced by policies, topography, and traffic arteries, and gradually shifts from expansion to infill, with the urban core of Wuhan continuously extending and the urban fringe rapidly expanding from 2000 to 2010, and gradually entering a stable development state from 2010 to 2020. The future urban construction of Wuhan should pay attention to the influences of these characteristics on the implementation of urban territorial spatial planning. Full article

Traffic prediction is a topic of increasing importance for research and applications in the domain of routing and navigation. Unfortunately, open data are rarely available for this purpose. To overcome this, the authors explored the possibility of using geo-tagged social media data (Twitter), land-use and land-cover point of interest data (from OpenStreetMap) and an adapted betweenness centrality measure as feature spaces to predict the traffic congestion of eleven world cities. The presented framework and workflow are termed as SocialMedia2Traffic. Traffic congestion was predicted at four tile spatial resolutions and compared with Uber Movement data. The overall precision of the forecast for highly traffic-congested regions was approximately 81%. Different data processing steps including ways to aggregate data points, different proxies and machine learning approaches were compared. The lack of a universal definition on a global scale to classify road segments by speed bins into different traffic congestion classes has been identified to be a major limitation of the transferability of the framework. Overall, SocialMedia2Traffic further improves the usability of the tested feature space for traffic prediction. A further benefit is the agnostic nature of the social media platform’s approach. Full article

Sustainability is one of the major challenges in the 21st century for humanity. Spatial zoning of ecosystem services is proposed in this study as a solution to meet the demands for the sustainable use of ecosystem services. This study presented a workflow and performed an exploratory analysis using self-organizing maps (SOM) for visualizing the spatial patterns of the ecosystem service value (ESV) of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). The zoning was performed based on 11 types of ecosystem services, resulting in 11 ecosystem service zones. Each of the zones derived has its unique characteristics in terms of the dominating ecosystem service types, ESV, land use/land cover patterns, and associated human activity levels. It is recommended that reasonable and effective utilization of the ecosystem services in the GBA should be based on its zonal characteristics rather than haphazard exploitations, which can contribute to the sustainable economy and environment of the region. The applicability of SOM for the GBA ecosystem service zoning has been demonstrated in this study. However, it should be stressed that the method and workflow presented in this study should mainly be used for supporting decision-making rather than used for deriving gold-standard zoning maps. Full article

The extraction of skeleton lines of buildings is a key step in building spatial analysis, which is widely performed for building matching and updating. Several methods for vector data skeleton line extraction have been established, including the improved constrained Delaunay triangulation (CDT) and raster data skeleton line extraction methods, which are based on image processing technologies. However, none of the existing studies have attempted to combine these methods to extract the skeleton lines of buildings. This study aimed to develop a building skeleton line extraction method based on vector–raster data integration. The research object was buildings extracted from remote sensing images. First, vector–raster data mapping relationships were identified. Second, the buildings were triangulated using CDT. The extraction results of the Rosenfeld thin algorithm for raster data were then used to remove redundant triangles. Finally, the Shi–Tomasi corner detection algorithm was used to detect corners. The building skeleton lines were extracted by adjusting the connection method of the type three triangles in CDT. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively extract the skeleton lines of complex vector buildings. Moreover, the skeleton line extraction results included a few burrs and were robust against noise. Full article

Methods and tools for assessing the visual impact of objects such as high-rises are rarely used in planning, despite the increase in opportunities to develop automated visual assessments, now that 3D urban data are acquired and used by municipalities as well as made available through open data portals. This paper presents a new method for assessing city visibility using a 3D model on a metropolitan scale. This method measures the view composition in terms of city objects visible from a given viewpoint and produces a georeferenced and semantically rich database of those visible objects in order to propose a thematic vision of the city and its urban landscape. As far as computational efficiency is concerned and considering the large amount of data needed, the method relies on a dedicated system of automatic data organization for analyzing visibility over vast areas (hundreds of square kilometers), offering various possibilities for uses on different scales. In terms of operational uses, as shown in our paper, the various results produced by the method (quantitative data, georeferenced databases and 3D schematic images) allow for a wide spectrum of applications in urban planning. Full article

Early detection of people’s suspicious behaviors can aid in the prevention of crimes and make the community safer. Existing methods that are focused on identifying abnormal behaviors from video surveillance that are based on computer vision, which are more suitable for detecting ongoing behaviors. While criminals intend to avoid abnormal behaviors under surveillance, their suspicious behaviors prior to crimes will be unconsciously reflected in the trajectories. Herein, we characterize several suspicious behaviors from unusual movement patterns, unusual behaviors, and unusual gatherings of people, and analyze their features that are hidden in the trajectory data. Meanwhile, the algorithms for suspicious behavior detection are proposed based on the main features of the corresponding behavior, which employ spatiotemporal clustering, semantic annotation, outlier detection, and other methods. A practical trajectory dataset (i.e., TucityLife) containing more than 1000 suspicious behaviors was collected, and experiments were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results indicate that the proposed method for suspicious behavior detection has a recall of 93.5% and a precision of 87.6%, demonstrating its excellent performance in identifying the possible offenders and potential target places. The proposed methods are valuable for preventing city crime and supporting the appropriate allocation of police resources. Full article

Understanding the regularity and determinants of mobility is indispensable for the reasonable deployment of shared bicycles and urban planning. A spatial interaction network covering streets in Beijing’s six main districts, using bike sharing data, is constructed and analyzed. as Additionally, the exponential random graph model (ERGM) is used to interpret the influencing factors of the network structure and the mobility regularity. The characteristics of the spatial interaction network structure and temporal characteristics between weekdays and weekends show the following: the network structure on weekdays is obvious; the flow edge is always between adjacent blocks; the traffic flow frequently changes and clusters; the network structure on weekends is more complex, showing scattering and seldom changing; and there is a stronger interaction between blocks. Additionally, the predicted result of the ERGM shows that the influencing factors selected in this paper are positively correlated with the spatial interaction network. Among them, the three most important determinants are building density, housing prices and the number of residential areas. Additionally, the determinant of financial services shows greater effects on weekdays than weekends. Full article

Since the recent outbreak of COVID-19, many scientists have started working on distinct challenges related to mining the available large datasets from social media as an effective asset to understand people’s responses to the pandemic. This study presents a comprehensive social data mining approach to provide in-depth insights related to the COVID-19 pandemic and applied to the Arabic language. We first developed a technique to infer geospatial information from non-geotagged Arabic tweets. Secondly, a sentiment analysis mechanism at various levels of spatial granularities and separate topic scales is introduced. We applied sentiment-based classifications at various location resolutions (regions/countries) and separate topic abstraction levels (subtopics and main topics). In addition, a correlation-based analysis of Arabic tweets and the official health providers’ data will be presented. Moreover, we implemented several mechanisms of topic-based analysis using occurrence-based and statistical correlation approaches. Finally, we conducted a set of experiments and visualized our results based on a combined geo-social dataset, official health records, and lockdown data worldwide. Our results show that the total percentage of location-enabled tweets has increased from 2% to 46% (about 2.5M tweets). A positive correlation between top topics (lockdown and vaccine) and the COVID-19 new cases has also been recorded, while negative feelings of Arab Twitter users were generally raised during this pandemic, on topics related to lockdown, closure, and law enforcement. Full article

GPS trajectories collected from automotive telematics for insurance purposes go beyond being a collection of points on the map. They are in fact a powerful data source that we can use to extract map and road network properties. While the location of road junctions is readily available, the information about the traffic control element regulating the intersection is typically unknown. However, this information would be helpful, e.g., for contextualizing a driver’s behavior. Our focus is to use a map-matched GPS OBD-dongle dataset provided by a Canadian insurance company to classify intersections into three classes according to the type of traffic control element present: traffic light, stop sign, or no sign. We design a convolutional neural network (CNN) for classifying intersections. The network takes as entries, for a defined number of trips, the speed and the acceleration profiles over each segment of one meter on a window around the intersection. Our method outperforms two other competing approaches, achieving 99% overall accuracy. Furthermore, our CNN model can infer the three classes even with as few as 25 trips. Full article

The bird community in urban areas indicates the species-specific adaptability to urban conditions such as the increase in man-made habitats. Urban adapters and urban exploiters, two groups that make up most of the urban birds, were assessed to determine their suitable habitat and explain their distribution, as well as to determine the environmental predictors for the two bird groups assemblages in Depok, one of Jakarta’s satellite cities. We used the point-count method to survey the birds in three habitat types, green spaces, residentials, and roadside, and then we used Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) to analyze the species distribution modeling. We also the predicted habitat distributions for the urban adapters and urban exploiters based on several environmental predictors. Our results suggest that both urban adapters and urban exploiters were abundant in residential areas. Eurasian tree sparrows (Passer montanus) and cave swiflets (Collocalia linchi) were the most common species in all three habitat types. On average, canopy cover was most extensive in green spaces followed by residential and roadside areas. Urban exploiters were likely to have a high suitability extent compared to urban adapters. The distributions of both groups were affected by the distance to perennial water, then by land function for the urban adapters, and distance to patches for the urban exploiters. The presence of urban adapters and urban exploiters in residential areas suggests that home gardens supported critical habitats when green spaces were unavailable. Full article

This articles presents a new series of maps showing the climate and environmental variability of Botswana. Situated in southern Africa, Botswana has an arid to semi-arid climate, which significantly varies in its different regions: Kalahari Desert, Makgadikgadi Pan and Okavango Delta. While desert regions are prone to droughts and periods of extreme heat during the summer months, other regions experience heavy downpours, as well as episodic and unpredictable rains that affect agricultural activities. Such climatic variations affect social and economic aspects of life in Botswana. This study aimed to visualise the non-linear correlations between the topography and climate setting at the country’s scale. Variables included T °C min, T °C max, precipitation, soil moisture, evapotranspiration (PET and AET), downward surface shortwave radiation, vapour pressure and vapour pressure deficit (VPD), wind speed and Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). The dataset was taken from the TerraClimate source and GEBCO for topographic mapping. The mapping approach included the use of Generic Mapping Tools (GMT), a console-based scripting toolset, which enables the use of a scripting method of automated mapping. Several GMT modules were used to derive a set of climate parameters for Botswana. The data were supplemented with the adjusted cartographic elements and inspected by the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL). The PDSI in Botswana in 2018 shows stepwise variation with seven areas of drought: (1) −3.7 to −2.2. (extreme); (2) −2.2 to −0.8 (strong, southern Kalahari); (3) −0.8 to 0.7 (significant, central Kalahari; (4) 0.7 to 2.1 (moderate); (5) 2.1 to 3.5 (lesser); (6) 3.5 to 4.9 (low); (7) 4.9 to 6.4 (least). The VPD has a general trend towards the south-western region (Kalahari Desert, up to 3.3), while it is lower in the north-eastern region of Botswana (up to 1.4). Other values vary respectively, as demonstrated in the presented 12 maps of climate and environmental inventory in Botswana. Full article

Historic Building Information Modelling (HBIM) methodology has revolutionized the entire cultural heritage documentation panorama since 2009. At the same time, the possibility of creating and managing HBIM projects by using open source solutions opened new research paths in 2016. Different reasons can drive the utilisation of free and open source software (FOSS), however the accessibility of a tailor-made project should be the main purpose. After six years of research on open source HBIM, this paper will review the actual panorama of designed and operative programmes on informative models of historic architecture built with FOSS solutions. Different aspects will be analysed, from open source software setup to parametric modelling and from semantic dimension to data exchange and cloud accessibility. Then, the advantages and drawbacks of open source protocols will be highlighted. Lastly, the next updates, future scenarios and developments on open source HBIM will be estimated. Full article

The aim of this paper is to present developments of an advanced geospatial analytics algorithm that improves the prediction power of a random forest regression model while addressing the issue of spatial dependence commonly found in geographical data. We applied the methodology to a simple model of mean household income in the European Union regions to allow easy understanding and reproducibility of the analysis. The results are encouraging and suggest an improvement in the prediction power compared to previous techniques. The algorithm has been implemented in R and is available in the updated version of the SpatialML package in the CRAN repository. Full article

The impact of COVID-19 across the United States (US) has been heterogeneous, with rapid spread and greater mortality in some areas compared with others. We used geographically-linked data to test the hypothesis that the risk for COVID-19 was defined by location and sought to define which demographic features were most closely associated with elevated COVID-19 spread and mortality. We leveraged geographically-restricted social, economic, political, and demographic information from US counties to develop a computational framework using structured Gaussian process to predict county-level case and death counts during the pandemic’s initial and nationwide phases. After identifying the most predictive information sources by location, we applied an unsupervised clustering algorithm and topic modeling to identify groups of features most closely associated with COVID-19 spread. Our model successfully predicted COVID-19 case counts of unseen locations after examining case counts and demographic information of neighboring locations, with overall Pearson’s correlation coefficient and the proportion of variance explained as 0.96 and 0.84 during the initial phase and 0.95 and 0.87 during the nationwide phase, respectively. Aside from population metrics, presidential vote margin was the most consistently selected spatial feature in our COVID-19 prediction models. Urbanicity and 2020 presidential vote margins were more predictive than other demographic features. Models trained using death counts showed similar performance metrics. Topic modeling showed that counties with similar socioeconomic and demographic features tended to group together, and some of these feature sets were associated with COVID-19 dynamics. Clustering of counties based on these feature groups found by topic modeling revealed groups of counties that experienced markedly different COVID-19 spread. We conclude that topic modeling can be used to group similar features and identify counties with similar features in epidemiologic research. Full article

Values (why to conserve) and Attributes (what to conserve) are essential concepts of cultural heritage. Recent studies have been using social media to map values and attributes conveyed by the public to cultural heritage. However, it is rare to connect heterogeneous modalities of images, texts, geo-locations, timestamps, and social network structures to mine the semantic and structural characteristics therein. This study presents a methodological framework for constructing such multi-modal datasets using posts and images on Flickr for graph-based machine learning (ML) tasks concerning heritage values and attributes. After data pre-processing using pre-trained ML models, the multi-modal information of visual contents and textual semantics are modelled as node features and labels, while their social relationships and spatio-temporal contexts are modelled as links in Multi-Graphs. The framework is tested in three cities containing UNESCO World Heritage properties—Amsterdam, Suzhou, and Venice— which yielded datasets with high consistency for semi-supervised learning tasks. The entire process is formally described with mathematical notations, ready to be applied in provisional tasks both as ML problems with technical relevance and as urban/heritage study questions with societal interests. This study could also benefit the understanding and mapping of heritage values and attributes for future research in global cases, aiming at inclusive heritage management practices. Moreover, the proposed framework could be summarized as creating attributed graphs from unstructured social media data sources, ready to be applied in a wide range of use cases. Full article

The paper aims at investigating modelling strategies in HBIM context to identify at what extent the final use of the model might affects, or should affect, the modelling approach itself. Moreover, the discussion wants to shed light on the possibility of connecting in just one digital environment several instances connected to the building. These aims will be discussed presenting and evaluating two different modelling approaches: the “black box” modelling and the “white box” model-ling. The two terms are partially borrowed from computer science to explain two types of testing. The “black box” testing is performed without any preliminary knowledge about the system functionality and internal components; on the contrary, the “white box” testing, implies a full knowledge of the system. These two approaches will be compared to two ways of conceiving a building information model. In conclusion, the paper will investigate the possibility to integrate in just one model, the grey box model, the two ones previously discussed. Full article

In this paper, we take the position that cities gain to be represented as three-dimensional spaces populated by scores of micro-scale-built spaces (buildings, rooms, passageways, squares, etc.). Effective algorithms that evaluate place-based accessibility in built structures while considering the indoor spaces’ complexity at a fine granularity are essential for indoor–outdoor seamless urban planning, navigation, way findings, and supporting emergencies. We present a comprehensive set of spatial modeling options and visualizations of indoor accessibility for an entire built structure based on various notions of travel impedance. Notably, we consider the metric length of the paths and their cognitive complexities due to topologic, syntactic, or integrated intricacy within our approaches. Our work presents a comprehensive selection of indoor accessibility analysis with a detailed implemental discussion that can be applied as a solid foundation for smart city applications or seamless urban research and planning. The analysis and visualization techniques presented in this paper can be easily applied to analyze and visualize built interior geographic spaces to study accessibility differentials in cities with vast vertical expansion aimed at achieving (or at avoiding) specific accessibility outcomes. Full article

The analysis of human movement patterns based on mobile network data makes it possible to examine a very large population cost-effectively and has led to several discoveries about human dynamics. However, the application of this data source is still not common practice. The goal of this study was to analyze the commuting tendencies of the Budapest Metropolitan Area using mobile network data as a case study and propose an automatized alternative approach to the current, questionnaire-based method, as commuting is predominantly analyzed by the census, which is performed only once in a decade in Hungary. To analyze commuting, the home and work locations of cell phone subscribers were determined based on their appearances during and outside working hours. The detected home locations of the subscribers were compared to census data at a settlement level. Then, the settlement and district level commuting tendencies were identified and compared to the findings of census-based sociological studies. It was found that the commuting analysis based on mobile network data strongly correlated with the census-based findings, even though home and work locations were estimated by statistical methods. All the examined aspects, including commuting from sectors of the agglomeration to the districts of Budapest and the age-group-based distribution of the commuters, showed that mobile network data could be an automatized, fast, cost-effective, and relatively accurate way of analyzing commuting, that could provide a powerful tool for sociologists interested in commuting. Full article