Category: Yleinen

Mobile Tartu 2024 – one of the highlights of our conference summer – was held on 12-14 June in Tartu, Estonia. Organised by our close colleagues from the Mobility Lab, University of Tartu, this year’s conference focussed on human mobility and mobile big data analytics for just and sustainable societies.

The three conference days of Mobile Tartu 2024 featured a wide variety of paper and poster presentations, engaging panel discussions, and top-notch keynote speeches by Prof Jukka Krisp, Prof Nico Van de Weghe, Assoc Prof Anu Masso and Assoc Prof Robin Lovelace. Many of the current and former members of the Digital Geography Lab were present in Tartu and gathered inspiration from the latest mobility research and fascinating coffee break chats with colleagues from around the world.

The Digital Geography Lab members had an honour to contribute to the conference programme in multiple ways – by presenting our most recent project results, chairing paper sessions, and participating in a panel discussion. Take a look at the brief photo collection of our presentations at Mobile Tartu 2024. Continue reading “Mobile Tartu 2024 – Three inspiring conference days with top-notch presentations and engaging discussions”

Eemil Haapanen introduces his MSc thesis

What’s this post about?

I completed my MSc thesis at the Digital Geography Lab, focusing on how cartographic interaction can be applied in exploring massive spatial datasets. More particularly, the dataset I visualized in my work was the Digital Geography Lab’s very own Helsinki Region Travel Time Matrix. In my thesis, I constructed an interactive web map application for visually exploring the data, and carried out a survey on how people used such an interactive application.

The map application allows for interactively exploring the entire Travel Time Matrix.

Why study cartographic interaction?

Cartographic interaction is often understood as a dialogue between a human and a map. As such, it is a process considered indispensable to reasoning with spatial information – be it analytical map use in a related field of science or, for example, the everyday task of exploring one’s surroundings with a mobile map application. Cartographic interaction is only growing in importance as both the amount of spatial data and the need to better understand it are growing fast. Harnessing the potential of cartographic interaction calls for user-inclusive studies designed around interactive map use, also necessitating the assessment of the rapidly evolving technologies enabling interactive maps.

Continue reading “Cartographic interaction for exploring travel time matrices – the development of an interactive web map application and a user survey”

On May 20 and 21, the Geoinformatics Research Days 2024 were hosted at Aalto University. It is a yearly conference initiated by the Finnish University Network for Geoinformatics (Fiuginet). This year’s edition featured researchers from various Finnish institutions working on geospatial topics, but also from abroad. Digital Geography Lab was represented with several contributions.

On Monday, PhD researcher Robert Klein presented his ongoing research on access to travel greenery in major European Cities. He highlighted how temporal variation should not be overlooked when assessing greenery exposure and that there is a trade-off between accessibility and availability of travel greenery in European Cities.

Tuesday started of with a keynote as part of the GeoSPA talk series, organized by our lecturer Kamyar Hasanzadeh. Kamyar invited Franz-Benjamin Mocnick from Paris-Lodron-University of Salzburg to share his work. In his thought-provoking talk, Franz illustrated how simple objects can turn into geographical information by representing places such as tourist attractions, cities, etc. Also, he explained that the communication and representation of places are so subjective and selective, that GIScience is not yet equipped with tools to capture these.

We were also pleased to have our “senior affiliate” Christoph Fink with us for a couple of days. He engaged in the panel discussion on the role of Geo-AI and possible future developments. He pointed out how AI has transformed the work with data in a way that enables researchers to handle immense amounts of data in an increasingly convenient and quick fashion.

Continue reading “Digital Geography Lab contributing to Geoinformatics Research Days 2024”

The Canary Islands are a biodiversity, geodiversity and tourism hotspot, boasting one of the most visited national parks in Europe (Teide in Tenerife). Tourism is the backbone of the local economy, but the growing masses of visitors put an unsustainable strain on the islands’ beautiful nature.

The islands are also acutely impacted by climate change and other megatrends including aging of population in Europe or digitalisation changing work life. On top of the traditional tourists, the islands are now receiving masses of long-term visitors seeking warm wintering grounds on the islands.  

These factors make the Canary Islands an interesting study area for the MOBICON project, where we study changes in nature visitation and their impacts on biodiversity conservation as well as the applicability of mobile big data sources for extracting visitor information.  

We (team Mobicon: Aina, Matti, Tatu and Tuuli) visited the islands of Gran Canaria and Tenerife in March 2024 for establishing collaboration with local universities and to collect research data through stakeholder discussions. Some highlights of the trip below.

Continue reading “Big data, big changes: Project MOBICON in the Canary Islands for a workshop and presentations”

The importance of natural areas for recreation and conservation alike is critical, yet we often don’t know how many people visit them and why. Such information is necessary for the management and development of natural areas, which is why research by our lab and others have considered mobile big data sources (think data from mobile phones, social media etc.) as a way to monitor outdoor recreation. Yet, translating scientific research into actionable information for management is not straightforward – is it even wise? What kind of information do managers of natural areas need? What sort of changes do they managers see, how do these affect their information needs, and what sort of larger trends drive these changes? 

Researchers in project Mobicon called together experts from Finnish nature organizations to reflect on these questions in September 2023. The aim of the workshop was to collect expert opinions related to the changes in the recreational use of nature, the monitoring needs related to the changing visitations, and to discuss the possibilities of various new data sources to meet managerial information needs. 

This workshop was the first of a series repeated in March 2024 in the Canary Islands. We have now released a report on the outcome of the Helsinki workshop. Check it out! 

In English: https://doi.org/10.31885/2024.030501 

Suomeksi: https://doi.org/10.31885/2024.030502 

If you wish to cite the reports, you may use:

Toivonen, T., Brias Guinart, A., Eklund, J., Hästbacka, M., Leppämäki, T. and Torkko, J. (2023). Potential of mobile big data for visitor monitoring: Report of the MOBICON workshop held in Helsinki 28.9.2023. Helsinki: Digital Geography Lab, University of Helsinki. doi:10.31885/2024.030501

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The Digital Geography Lab is an interdisciplinary research team focusing on spatial Big Data analytics for fair and sustainable societies at the University of Helsinki.