GIScience Research at the 2014 E sri International User Conference

The first eight articles in this issue of Transactions in GIS were gathered from a call for abstracts and will be presented in three research sessions scheduled for the third day of the 2014 Esri International User Conference to be held in San Diego, California. A total of 16 abstracts were submitted and nine were selected by the journal editors for preparation as full journal articles. Each of the manuscripts has been through the usual journal peer review process and the final versions of the eight research articles included in this special issue have been revised in light of both the reviewer’s and the editor’s feedback. The eight articles selected for publication cover a wide range of topics and address some of the key concepts and applications of geographic information science from a variety of perspectives. Three of the articles explore some of the ways in which geographic information systems can be combined with sensors, mobile devices and social media to learn more about and/or to guide human behavior, one describes user interaction patterns within online systems for public participation transportation planning, another describes how spatial analysis tools and ArcMarine can be customized to visualize and analyze genetic records for cetaceans and other marine megafauna, one explores how hierarchical clustering can help with the mapping of large flow data, and the final two articles propose new GIS frameworks for analyzing spatial access to healthcare services on the one hand and the likely economic and environmental consequences of expanding sugarcane cropping in Brazil on the other hand. All eight articles highlight, in one way or another, the value of spatio-temporal analysis and the role of geographic information science as an enabling science in a wide range of multi-disciplinary settings and applications. The first article, by Dorothy Dick, Shaun Walbridge, Dawn Wright, John Calambokidis, Erin Falcone, Debbie Steel, Tomas Follett, Jason Holmberg, and Scott Baker, describes geneGIS, a suite of GIS tools and a customized Arc Marine data model to facilitate visual exploration and spatial analyses of individual-based records from DNA profiles and photo-identification records of cetaceans and other marine megafauna. The development of these new tools and their inclusion in a new ArcGIS Python Add-in are detailed in this article and the utility of this new suite of GIS tools is then demonstrated using an integrated database containing more than 18,000 records of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) in the North Pacific. The second article, by Anastasia Petrenko, Anton Sizo, Qian Winchel, Dylan Knowles, Amin Tavassolian, Kevin Stanley, and Scott Bell, builds on the authors’ previous work and describes a new methodology that utilizes indoor wireless networking and sensor-based systems to improve the collection of human movement and behavior data. The authors present the results of an experiment in which they tracked the mobility of a series of participants on the University of Saskatchewan campus over the course of several days, to demonstrate how the participant’s movement behavior can be successfully documented with their proposed method. The third article, by Diansheng Guo and Chao Chen, proposes a methodology for extracting Twitter user characteristics based on the geographic, graph-based and content-based features of tweets, constructing a training dataset by manually inspecting and labeling a large bs_bs_banner