spatial analysis – Jennifer A Miller, PhD

TT spatial data science position!

The Department of Geography and the Environment at The University of Texas at Austin invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Spatial Data Science to begin Fall of academic year 2024-25. Candidates would be expected to use advanced spatial modeling techniques such as AI and neural networks, machine learning, or spatial simulation to address one, or preferably more, of the following socio-environmental ‘real world’ issues:

• Climate change impacts

• Geographies of health & wellbeing

• Infectious disease spread

• Migration, displacement, & (im)mobility

• Natural hazards/disasters

• Social & spatial inequalities

• Sustainable energy use & production

• Urbanization

https://apply.interfolio.com/129706

Beautiful Austin, Texas

New collaborative paper in GA

New paper in Geographical Analysis discusses how spatial analysis can contribute to spatial justice: Making space in Geographical Analysis

2 new papers from NYMPHS project

Two new forensic palynology papers from our MURI-funded NYMPHS project were recently published.

Daoqin Tong (ASU) led the effort to develop GOFIND, a geocomputational network model to help identify “spatial footprints” or likely locations associated with an object.

Eddie Helderop (UT-Austin) was lead author on a that further refined the GOFIND model using modified social network analysis tools.

A spatial exploration of the ‘halo effect’ in the 2016 US presidential election

Was the ‘halo effect’ (proportion of immigrants in surrounding area) correlated with GOP vote proportion in the 2016 election? The halo effect has been studied in Europe, where it has often been correlated with far-right voting patterns. This paper examines the halo effect and uses geographically weighted regression to explore whether the effect varies spatially.

Special issue in IJGIS

I joined Janet Franklin (UC-Riverside), Shawn Laffan (University New South Wales), & Andrew Skidmore (University of Twente) to edit a special issue on Spatial Ecology in IJGIS, “Modeling movement, distributions, diversity, and disturbance.”

New overview paper on analyzing movement

This recent IJGIS paper was a result of two NSF-funded workshops co-organized by Jennifer Miller, Gil Bohrer (OSU), and Harvey Miller (OSU). We highlight emerging themes and commonalities in animal movement and human mobility research.

Jennifer invited to give seminar at University of Amsterdam

I was invited to give a seminar at the Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) at the University of Amsterdam. The visit coincided with King’s Day, a national holiday to celebrate the King’s birthday.

Special Issue on Spatial Ecology in IJGIS

CFP for the 5th special issue on Spatial Ecology in International Journal of Geographical Information Science is announced.

Special Issue Editors:

Assoc Prof Jennifer Miller, University of Texas at Austin, USA;

Assoc Prof Shawn Laffan, University of NSW, Australia;

Prof Andrew Skidmore, ITC, University of Twente, The Netherlands;

Prof Janet Franklin, University of California-Riverside, USA

A 5^th special issue on spatial ecology has been approved by the Editors and Publisher of the International Journal of GIS. You are encouraged to submit relevant and high quality manuscripts for this special issue (see details below). This special issue continues the tradition of Spatial Ecology publications in the IJGIS.

For this special issue, we are seeking the submission of papers from ecological and related environmental studies, as well as more technical articles including topics such as spatial data infrastructure relevant to ecological applications. We are especially interested in special and novel ways of addressing spatial ecology questions, managing spatial ecological data, and advancing open science in spatial ecology.

Key words and topics for this special issue include scale, geovisualization, spatial data infrastructure for ecological (biodiversity) data, methods to derive ancillary data required for ecological modeling (climate, terrain, soils etc), animal movement including both spatial and temporal analysis, phenology, global databases for ecological studies (biodiversity, NPP, carbon etc), fragmentation and connectivity, biodiversity hotspots and endemism, physical vegetation structure for biomass assessment, palaeoecology and reconstructing past environments with respect to climate change, innovative methods and models for spatial ecological analysis, and open science and new directions for spatial ecology research. Applications across terrestrial, marine and atmospheric ecology are welcome. Relevant cross-over papers between GIS and remote sensing will also be considered.

The deadline for submission of papers is 15-July-2018. The anticipated publication date will be in 2019.

Papers are to be submitted via http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijgis. Please choose ‘Special Issue Paper’ from the Manuscript Types field when doing so.

Jennifer presents research at Geocomputation conference

Jennifer presented her work on “A computational movement analysis approach for modelling interactions between pairs of moving objects” at the 2017 Geocomputation conference in Leeds, UK. Paul Holloway (UT PhD ’16) also presented his work on “Individual-based modelling of species’ dynamic resource use.”

Lots of ham was eaten

Research collaboration with AIMS continues

Jennifer spent several weeks back in Perth, Western Australia continuing a collaboration with Drs. Ben Radford and Marji Puotinen at the Australia Institute of Marine Science. They focused on using geographically weighted regression to explore spatial accuracy of models of mixed benthos assemblages in the Northern Kimberley region and were able to squeeze in a writing retreat on Rottnest Island.