Volunteered geographic information research in the first decade: a narrative review of selected journal articles in GIScience

ABSTRACT

More than 10 years have passed since the coining of the term volunteered geographic information (VGI) in 2007. This article presents the results of a review of the literature concerning VGI. A total of 346 articles published in 24 international refereed journals in GIScience between 2007 and 2017 have been reviewed. The review has uncovered varying levels of popularity of VGI research over space and time, and varying interests in various sources of VGI (e.g. OpenStreetMap) and VGI-related terms (e.g. user-generated content) that point to the multi-perspective nature of VGI. Content-wise, using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), this study has extracted 50 specific research topics pertinent to VGI. The 50 topics have been subsequently clustered into 13 intermediate topics and three overarching themes to allow a hierarchical topic review. The overarching VGI research themes include (1) VGI contributions and contributors, (2) main fields applying VGI, and (3) conceptions and envisions. The review of the articles under the three themes has revealed the progress and the points that demand attention regarding the individual topics. This article also discusses the areas that the existing research has not yet adequately explored and proposes an agenda for potential future research endeavors.     

Temporal variation of suspended sediment transport in the Koga catchment,North Western Ethiopia and environmental implications

Event sediment transport and yield were studied for 45 events in the upstream part of the 260 km² agricultural Koga catchment that drains to an irrigation reservoir. Discharge and turbidity data were collected over a period of more than a year, accompanied by grab sampling. Turbidity was very well correlated with the sediment concentrations from the samples (r = 0.99), which allowed us to estimate the temporal patterns of sediment concentrations within events. The hysteresis patterns between discharge and sediment concentrations were analysed to provide insight into the different sediment sources. Anticlockwise patterns are the dominant hysteresis patterns in the area, suggesting smaller contributions of suspended sediment from the river channels than from the hillslopes and agricultural areas. Complicated types of hysteresis patterns were mostly observed for long events with multiple peaks. For a given discharge, sediment yields in August and September, when the catchment was almost completely covered with vegetation, were much smaller than during the rest of the rainy season. The hysteresis patterns and timing suggest that the sediment availability from the agricultural areas and hillslopes affects sediment yields more strongly than does peak discharge. Two distinct types of sediment rating curves were observed for the season when the agricultural land was covered with vegetation and when it was not, indicating the dominating contribution of land use/cover to sediment yields in the catchment. The rate of suspended sediment transport in the area was estimated as 25.6 t year^?1 ha^?1. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Think regionally,act locally?: gardening,cycling, and the horizon of urban spatial politics

In the contemporary American urban renaissance, formerly fringe efforts to produce place, conducted by longtime residents and “urban pioneers” alike, now shape mainstream urbanism. Gardening and bicycling are constitutive of contemporary excitement about the city, representing the reinvigoration of the urban neighborhood following the depredations of suburbanization. This paper draws on research in California cities to offer a sympathetic critique of these leading edges of progressive urbanism, arguing that advocates’ overwhelming focus on the local creates a scalar mismatch between the horizon of political action and the problems they hope to address. Even as supporters of gardening and cycling understand themselves as implicitly allied with struggles for the right to the city, their work to produce local space is often blind to, and even complicit in, racialized dynamics of accumulation and exclusion that organize metropolises. The result is a progressive urbanism largely disconnected from broader left struggles for spatial justice.     

Comparing the Validity and Reliability of Place Attachment Across Cultures

Researchers often measure human–place bonds via place attachment scales across a variety of settings. However, scale use does not always include an evaluation of the scales’ psychometric properties, especially in multisite studies. Failure to consider a place attachment scale’s measurement properties makes both validity and reliability assumptions and may lead to improper data interpretation. Hence, this investigation assessed a place attachment scale across three sites via data collected on site in natural resource protected areas in Colorado, Minnesota, and Germany. A series of confirmatory factor analyses assessed the hypothesized two-dimensional (i.e., place identity and place dependence) model, Cronbach’s alphas calculated a measure of internal consistency, and a multigroup procedure cross-validated the scale. Some items did not load on the hypothesized dimension and the pattern of factor loadings was not equivalent across settings, suggesting assessment of place attachment scales may be necessary when used in new contexts.     

Fractionation of grain size in terrestrial sediment routing systems

Sediment is fractionated by size during its cascade from source to sink in sediment routing systems. It is anticipated, therefore, that the grain size distribution of sediment will undergo down‐system changes as a result of fluvial sorting processes and selective deposition. We assess this hypothesis by comparing grain size statistical properties of samples from within the erosional source region with those that have undergone different amounts of transport. A truncated Pareto distribution describes well the coarser half of the clast size distribution of regolith, coarse channel bed sediment and proximal debris flows (particularly their levees), as well as the coarser half of the clast size distribution of gravels that have undergone considerable amounts of transport in rivers. The Pareto shape parameter a evolves in response to mobilization, sediment transport and, importantly, the selective extraction of particles from the surface flow to build underlying stratigraphy. A goodness of fit statistic, the Kolmogorov–Smirnov vertical difference, illustrates the closeness of the observed clast size distributions to the Pareto, Weibull and log‐normal models as a function of distance from the depositional apex. The goodness of fit of the particle size distribution of regolith varies with bedrock geology. Bedload sediment at catchment outlets is fitted well by the log‐normal and truncated Pareto models, whereas the exponential Weibull model provides a less good fit. In the Eocene Escanilla palaeo‐sediment routing system of the south‐central Pyrenees, the log‐normal and truncated Pareto models provide excellent fits for distances of up to 80 km from the depositional apex, whereas the Weibull fit progressively worsens with increasing transport distance. A similar trend is found in the Miocene–Pliocene gravels of the Nebraskan Great Plains over a distance of >300 km. Despite the large fractionation in mean grain size and gravel percentage from source region to depositional sink, particle size distributions therefore appear to maintain log‐normality over a wide range of transport distance. Use of statistical models enables down‐system fractionation of sediment released from source regions to be better understood and predicted and is a potentially valuable tool in source‐to‐sink approaches to basin analysis.     

Household and community responses to impacts of climate change in the rural hills of Nepal

The research was designed to answer how households and local communities in rural Nepal are responding to the impacts of climate change. Using four villages as case study units, a mixed method approach was adopted in a multi-scaled process carried out at community, district and national levels. The research found that adaptation practices being adopted differ according to household well-being and are largely governed by access to education, information and resources within the community. Responses such as livelihood and income diversification, internal migration, share cropping, taking consumption loans, use of alternative energy and use of bio-pesticides were found to mostly vary according to well-being status of the interviewees. Development of adaptation plans, strategies and support mechanisms should take account of the different adaptation practices and needs of households. If such individual situations are not considered, adaptation responses may be ineffective or even be maladaptive and increase vulnerability. The research also found that the autonomous, unplanned and reactive nature of adaptation practices chosen by rural communities can contribute to further inequity and unequal power relations. The knowledge generated from this research contributes to understanding of how climate change contributes to vulnerability, but also how local practices and lack of an effective climate policy or response measures may magnify the effects of many existing drivers of vulnerability in terms of maladaptation and increasing social inequalities.     

High-Resolution Vertical Profile Measurements for Carbon Dioxide and Water Vapour Concentrations Within and Above Crop Canopies

We present a portable elevator-based facility for measuring \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\), water vapour, temperature and wind-speed profiles between the soil surface and the atmospheric surface layer above crop canopies. The end of a tube connected to a closed-path gas analyzer is continuously moved up and down over the profile range (in our case, approximately 2 m) while concentrations are logged at a frequency of \(20 \hbox { s}^{-1}\). Using campaign measurements in winter wheat, winter barley and a catch crop mixture (spring 2015 to autumn 2016) during different stages of crop development and different times of the day, we demonstrate a simple approach to correct for time lags, and the resulting profiles of 30-min mean mole fractions of \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\) and \(\hbox {H}_{2}\hbox {O}\) over height increments of 0.025 m. The profiles clearly show the effects of soil respiration and photosynthetic carbon assimilation, varying both during the diurnal cycle and during the growing season. Profiles of temperature and wind speed are based on a ventilated finewire thermocouple and a hot-wire anemometer, respectively. Measurements over bare soil and a short plant canopy were analyzed in the framework of Monin–Obukhov similarity theory to check the validity of the measurements and raw-data-processing approach. Derived fluxes of \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\), latent and sensible heat and momentum show good agreement with eddy-covariance measurements.     

Escaping the climate policy uncertainty trap: options contracts for REDD+

Climate policy uncertainty significantly hinders investments in low-carbon technologies, and the global community is behind schedule to curb carbon emissions. Strong actions will be necessary to limit the increase in global temperatures, and continued delays create risks of escalating climate change damages and future policy costs. These risks are system-wide, long-term and large-scale and thus hard to diversify across firms. Because of its unique scale, cost structure and near-term availability, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation in developing countries (REDD+) has significant potential to help manage climate policy risks and facilitate the transition to lower greenhouse gas emissions. ‘Call’ options contracts in the form of the right but not the obligation to buy high-quality emissions reduction credits from jurisdictional REDD+ programmes at a predetermined price per ton of CO₂ could help unlock this potential despite the current lack of carbon markets that accept REDD+ for compliance. This approach could provide a globally important cost-containment mechanism and insurance for firms against higher future carbon prices, while channelling finance to avoid deforestation until policy uncertainties decline and carbon markets scale up.

Key policy insights

• Climate policy uncertainty discourages abatement investments, exposing firms to an escalating systemic risk of future rapid increases in emission control expenditures.

• This situation poses a risk of an abatement ‘short squeeze,’ paralleling the case in financial markets when prices jump sharply as investors rush to square accounts on an investment they have sold ‘short’, one they have bet against and promised to repay later in anticipation of falling prices.

• There is likely to be a willingness to pay for mechanisms that hedge the risks of abruptly rising carbon prices, in particular for ‘call’ options, the right but not the obligation to buy high-quality emissions reduction credits at a predetermined price, due to the significantly lower upfront capital expenditure compared to other hedging alternatives.

• Establishing rules as soon as possible for compliance market acceptance of high-quality emissions reductions credits from REDD+ would facilitate REDD+ transactions, including via options-based contracts, which could help fill the gap of uncertain climate policies in the short and medium term.