Parks and other green spaces are an important part of sustainable, healthy and socially equal urban environment. Urban planning and green space management benefit from information about green space use and values, but such data are often scarce and laborious to collect. Temporally dynamic geographic information generated by users of different mobile devices and social media platforms are a promising source of data for studying green spaces.

In a recent article published in the Landscape and Urban Planning journal we compare the ability of different user-generated data sets to provide information on where, when and how people use and value urban green spaces. We compare four types of data: social media, sports tracking, mobile phone operator and public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) data in a case study from Helsinki, Finland, and ask: 1) where the spatial hot-spots of green space use are, 2) when people use green spaces, 3) what activities are present in green spaces and 4) who are using green spaces based on available sample data sets.

Continue reading “A new paper on understanding the use of urban green spaces from user-generated data”

Yearly award for the best Master’s thesis have been again presented by the city of Helsinki on Monday the 9th of December 2019. We at the Digital Geography Lab would like to give special congrats to three awarded GIS wizards from the Department of Geography and Geosciences, Univerisity of Helsinki: Claudia Bergroth, Hertta Sydänlammi and Elias Willberg!

Bergroth Claudia (2019): Uncovering population dynamics using mobile phone data: the case of Helsinki Metropolitan Area.

The estimated hourly distribution of people on an average weekday in the Finnish Capital Region based on network-driven cellular mobile phone data. Read more about Claudia’s work in this blog post. 

Continue reading “Congratulations Claudia, Hertta and Elias for the City of Helsinki Master’s thesis award!”

Overview of Akseli Toikka’s MSc thesis: Mapping the green view of Helsinki through Google street view images

Click to browse the interactive GVI map of Helsinki.

Urban vegetation has traditionally been mapped through traditional ways of remote sensing like laser scanning and aerial photography. However, it has been stated that the bird view examination of vegetation cannot fully represent the amount of green vegetation that the citizens observe on street level. Recent studies have raised human perspective methods like street view images and measuring of green view next to more traditional ways of mapping vegetation. Green view index (GVI) states the percentage of green vegetation in street view on certain location. The purpose of my thesis was to create a green view dataset of Helsinki city using Google street view (GSV) imagery and to reveal the differences between human perspective and aerial perspective in vegetation mapping.

Continue reading “How green are the streets of Helsinki?”

Earlier this week, Henna Fabritius took part in the environmental dialogues -event  to discuss biodiversity-related modelling tools in urban greenery planning.

More information, and a recording of the event is available here (in Finnish):

Ympäristödialogeja: Miten suunnitella monimuotoista luontoa?

The event was organized by the Forum for Environmental Information (Ympäristötiedon foorumi in Finnish), which is a non-profit organization that aims at increasing interaction between the producers and users of environmental information in order to support national policy making in Finland, while keeping in mind the global significance of environmental problems.

Read also Henna’s blog about getting better at supporting urban biodiversity (in Finnish):
https://www.nessling.fi/ymparistodialogeja/mina-vaitan-luonnon-monimuotoisuutta-voitaisiin-tukea-kaupungeissa-nykyista-enemman/

In this blog, we share latest news about our research activities, teaching, GISviz and so on! For more information about Digital Geography Lab, please visit our webpages at helsinki.fi/digital-geography.