Authors: Age Poom, Olle Järv, Matthew Zook and Tuuli Toivonen

We have just published our commentary regarding human mobility, mobile Big Data and the responses to COVID-19 pandemic in the Big Data & Society journal (see also the journal’s blog).

This commentary was motivated by our previous experience with mobile Big Data and recent work on changed human mobility derived from mobile phone data during the COVID-19 outbreak in Finland (e.g. Järv et al. 2020a; Järv etal. 2020b). It also draws from the knowledge and experiences of our peers around the globe.

In short, the mobility restrictions related to COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in the biggest disruption to individual mobilities in modern times. The crisis is clearly spatial in nature, and examining the geographical aspect is important in understanding the broad implications of the pandemic. We can benefit from the avalanche of mobile Big Data that makes it possible to study the spatial effects of the crisis with spatiotemporal detail at the national and global scales. Yet, the current crisis also highlights serious limitations in the readiness to take the advantage of mobile Big Data for social good, at large, regarding technological, administrative and legislative aspects.

Continue reading “COVID-19 is spatial: Ensuring that mobile Big Data is used for social good”

Overview of Joose Helle’s MSc thesis

Exposure to noise pollution can cause various adverse health effects such as increased blood pressure and stress levels. Noise exposure has traditionally been assessed in terms of home location, as required by national and international policies. However, a substantial share of individuals’ total daily noise exposure is likely to happen while they are on the move. This evidently also affects the healthiness of active travel modes, walking or cycling, by reducing or even outweighing positive health effects of physical activity. Thus, there is a clear need for advancing exposure assessment beyond residential location to gain a true understanding of exposure profiles and their potential effects on health and well-being.

Journey-time exposure assessment can study spatially dynamic exposure to pollutants as people move through the urban environment. Furthermore, least-cost routing can be applied to find healthier paths with lower exposure levels to pollutants. This novel research field has a potential to support urban sustainability and equitability through increasing awareness of the qualities of travel environments, assessing population exposure, supporting individual mobility choices as well as planning healthier travel infrastructure throughout the urban fabric.

These tasks are not trivial. How to assess dynamic exposure to noise pollution? How to find routes with less noise than on the shortest route? How to develop a mobile navigation application for exposure-based route planning? These were the key questions I addressed in my master’s thesis: Quiet paths for people: developing routing analysis and Web GIS application, defended in May 2020 at the University of Helsinki.

Continue reading “Quiet paths for daily travel: developing online navigation and exposure assessment tool”

Authors: Johanna Eklund, Ari-Pekka Jokinen, and Tuuli Toivonen

Introduction

The coronavirus pandemic will have long lasting impacts on the conservation of biodiversity and protected areas. In many Nordic countries, people have been visiting green areas, protected areas included, more than ever. In the Global South however, the situation is almost the opposite, putting conservation at risk. In many developing countries, nature-based tourism has been important for financing biodiversity conservation. Tourism to protected areas has, however, ceased drastically during the global confinement strategies. The consequences of vanishing tourism are very visible for example in Madagascar, one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, with the highest number of threatened species globally. While being rich in biodiversity, Madagascar is economically among the poorest nations in the world. Madagascar currently has protected 7.5 % of its terrestrial land area, but this protection relies on funding from abroad. Previous research (Eklund et al. 2016 & Eklund et al. 2019) have shown that the protected areas have the capacity to curb deforestation, but funding is needed for the maintenance of conservation actions.

In Madagascar, tourism contribute to approximately 30 % of the annual income of the protected area agency Madagascar National Parks (MNP). MNP is managing some of the most visited national parks in the country. Due to the pandemic there have been concerns raised that the loss of tourism revenue could make the protected areas more vulnerable to illegal encroachment, such as poaching and deforestation. Both Mongabay and National Geographic have reported about these concerns recently. So far the concerns have been based on expert opinions and anecdotal evidence. In this writing, we provide evidence that the protected areas in Madagascar are experiencing rapid increases in human induced fires during the corona crisis.

Continue reading “COVID-19 causes a threat to protected areas in the Global South – evidence from Madagascar”

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”