Digital Geography Lab

@digigeolab@mastodon.online
574 Followers
1,036 Following
297 Posts
Interdisciplinary research lab at the University of #Helsinki , #Finland. Spa­tial big data ana­lyt­ics on a human scale for fair and sustainable so­ci­et­ies. Lead by @tuuli #openscience
Homepagehttps://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/digital-geography-lab
Linkedinhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-geography-lab/
Blueskyhttps://bsky.app/profile/digigeolab.bsky.social
GitHubhttps://github.com/DigitalGeographyLab
Digital Geography LabMay 16
Tuomas Väisänen 📼🧟‍♂️May 15

Quite many from @digigeolab were at the #LBS2025 conference last week presenting our work on #Mobility #GIScience #Geography and #GeoAI, and we wrote a small blog post on it.

https://blogs.helsinki.fi/digital-geography/2025/05/15/digital-geography-lab-at-lbs-2025-conference-at-aalto-university/

Digital Geography Lab at LBS 2025 conference at Aalto University – Digital Geography Lab blog

Digital Geography LabMay 9
Tuomas Väisänen 📼🧟‍♂️May 8

The second day of #LBS2025 conference is about to start, and so is the onslaught of presentations from @digigeolab members and alumni on topics like #mobility #BigData #GIScience #MachineLearning #NatureRecreation #Segregation #EcosystemServices #Geography

I have the dubious honor of the very last presentation of the day, acting as the firewall between the scientific program and the conference dinner. Let's see how many turn up 😅

Digital Geography LabMay 8
Tuomas Väisänen 📼🧟‍♂️May 7

The 19th Location Based Services conference #LBS2025 is about to start in #Espoo at #AaltoUniversity.

I am presenting tomorrow, so today I get to chillax 😎 We have a very good representation from @digigeolab

Digital Geography LabApr 30

Exciting milestone for our GREENTRAVEL team!!

We’ve officially wrapped up data collection for our VR cycling experiments—with an impressive 151 participants 🚴‍♀️

Juulia Lehtinen explains more 👉 https://blogs.helsinki.fi/digital-geography/2025/04/29/finalising-the-data-collection-for-the-virtual-reality-cycling-experiments-a-pit-stop-worth-celebrating-for-the-greentravel-project/

Now it’s time to dive into data analysis with fresh excitement!

Finalising the data collection for the Virtual Reality cycling experiments – a pit stop worth celebrating for the GREENTRAVEL project! – Digital Geography Lab blog

Digital Geography LabApr 14

Mobility viewpoint needs to be recognized in urban greening policies! 🚴‍🌳🏙️

New #GREENTRAVEL paper out!

A perspective paper by Silviya Korpilo et al., published in Ambio, describes how people’s contact with urban nature often happens when moving through space.

Interested? Read the paper here 👇
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-025-02178-w

Restoring nature, enhancing active mobility: The role of street greenery in the EU’s 2024 restoration law - Ambio

This article argues for the importance of integrating a mobility perspective into urban greenspace planning and practice related to the 2024 EU Nature Restoration Law. Street greenery can play an important multifunctional role in promoting ecosystem services and functions, sustainable mobility, and human health and well-being. However, planners need more evidence on how street vegetation affects health and well-being during everyday active mobility, as well as what type, where and for whom to enhance vegetation. We discuss current advancements and gaps in literature related to these topics, and identify key research priorities to support restoration policy and practice. These include: moving beyond dominant scientific thinking of being in place to moving through space in understanding greenery exposure and experience; use of multiple exposure metrics with attention to temporal dynamics; integration of objective and subjective assessments; and investigating further the role of street greenery in reducing environmental injustices.

SpringerLink
Digital Geography LabApr 3

The onset of spring in Helsinki always inspires and energizes us, as do the amazing researchers who come to visit us! We're delighted to introduce Eline Rega, a PhD researcher from KU Leuven in Belgium who visits us this April! 🤩

Eline works to generate novel insights into how green space impacts human health and wellbeing. 🌲 🏡🏥 🌲

Learn more from Eline herself 👉 https://blogs.helsinki.fi/digital-geography/2025/04/03/meet-eline-rega-a-phd-researcher-from-ku-leuven/

Meet Eline Rega, a PhD researcher from KU Leuven! – Digital Geography Lab blog

Digital Geography LabApr 3

📢 New master's thesis finalised! 🎉 🎉 🎉

"Activity tracking data for protected area visitor monitoring: A case study of mountain biking using Strava Metro" by Mikko Kangasmaa 😍

🎓 Find the thesis here: https://helda.helsinki.fi/items/73ae8773-c8bd-4835-a599-c52f38f61b6b
📄 Find Mikko's summary here: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/digital-geography/2025/04/03/activity-tracking-data-for-protected-area-visitor-monitoring-a-case-study-of-mountain-biking-using-strava-metro/

DSpace

Digital Geography LabMar 29
Tatu LeppämäkiMar 28

🚨 NEW ARTICLE 🚨

How many photos are uploaded to Flickr? Where? By who? Why does any of it matter? We explore the rise and fall of #Flickr in this @digigeolab paper by yours truly, Vuokko Heikinheimo, @eklund_jo, Anna Hausmann & @tuuli – now out in the Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism.

Article: https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S2213-0780(25)00026-X

Thread 👇

#giscience #geography #gis #opendata

Digital Geography LabMar 27
Tuomas Väisänen 📼🧟‍♂️Mar 26

🚨🌍 NEW ARTICLE 🌍🚨

We geocoded the #mobility of over 2 million #Erasmus students across #Europe from 2014 to 2022 with @miladmzdh Oula Inkeröinen & Olle Järv. The data descriptor article is published in #ScientificData, and is an output from the #MobiTwin project.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04789-0

@digigeolab

#GIScience #Geospatial #GIS #MobiTwin #OpenData #OpenScience

Digital Geography LabMar 26

📣 Great News!!! ...🚲...🚲...🚲...

PhD researcher Xiao Cai has published a new article "Differences in bike-sharing usage and its associations with station-surrounding characteristics: A multi-group analysis using machine learning techniques”! 🎉

We congratulate on his Xiao on his excellent and exciting research! 💚 💚 💚

Learn more here: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/digital-geography/2025/03/25/new-paper-out-on-demographic-specific-factors-influencing-bike-sharing-usage/

Find the article here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2025.104201

New paper out on demographic-specific factors influencing bike-sharing usage! – Digital Geography Lab blog

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Tatu LeppämäkiMar 28

🚨 NEW ARTICLE 🚨

How many photos are uploaded to Flickr? Where? By who? Why does any of it matter? We explore the rise and fall of #Flickr in this @digigeolab paper by yours truly, Vuokko Heikinheimo, @eklund_jo, Anna Hausmann & @tuuli – now out in the Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism.

Article: https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S2213-0780(25)00026-X

Thread 👇

#giscience #geography #gis #opendata

Show threadTatu LeppämäkiMar 28
You might wonder: “Flickr, the photo-uploading platform from ten years ago!?”. Yes, it’s a wonderful platform for many reasons, not the least of which is its open, Web 2.0.-esque API. It is easy to get geolocated data from anywhere. This has made Flickr popular as a way to approximate people’s presence and preferences in research; think tourist movements, finding hotspots in a city, etc. not to mention that Flickr underlies many computer vision datasets and models.
Show threadTatu LeppämäkiMar 28
User-generated datasets that are only incidentally useful for research purposes have a problem: little is known about them. How many observations are there? Where are those observations? Who made them? Without these, we know little about the baggage and biases brought into subsequent analyses. We address this by describing the spatial and temporal patterns of 227M geolocated photos in 2010–2022 by ~1.5M users. We focus on why this matters when studying people’s recreational visits to nature
Show threadTatu LeppämäkiMar 28
What did we find? (1) the popularity of Flickr has dropped significantly over the 13 year study period. Especially the number of active users has seemingly taken a nosedive.
Show threadTatu LeppämäkiMar 28
(2) More of that remaining data is produced by the most active ‘super-users’ of Flickr – top 1 % of users uploaded about 1 / 3 of the photos!
Show threadTatu LeppämäkiMar 28
(3) Flickr is clearly a platform of the "Global North": it’s users and use are concentrated in Europe and North America. Over time, an even greater share of use is in Europe.
Show threadTatu LeppämäkiMar 28
(4) All of this is reflected on who make posts from nature, or protected areas in this case. For example, Europeans and North Americans make about ¾ of the visits to African protected areas on Flickr.
Show threadTatu LeppämäkiMar 28
(5) Finally, we tested the reliability of data acquisition from the platform and found that the API responds inconsistently to repeated queries.
Show threadTatu LeppämäkiMar 28
Drawing it all together, we argue that these trends and biases (shrinking user-base in the Global North, and an inconsistent API) should be considered if opting for Flickr data. For example, if Flickr is used a proxy for people visiting national parks, does a drop over time indicate a fall in visits or the popularity of Flickr? Naturally, this is not limited to Flickr: all research that uses user-generated dataset opportunistically face similar questions.
Show threadTatu LeppämäkiMar 28
We hope to help future research by sharing the aggregated datasets presented above as figures and processing codes to produce them: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.27055018.v1
Codes and derived datasets for the article: "The rise and fall of the social media platform Flickr: Implications for nature recreation research"

Processing and visualisation codes for replicating the results presented in the article The rise and fall of the social media platform Flickr: Implications for nature recreation research, Leppämäki et al. 2025, Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism. Aggregated and derived datasets used in the paper are also shared publicly, as well as high quality versions of the figures.Please note that the raw Flickr photo metadata is not shared publicly and must be provided by the user. See processing_codes.ipynb for details and README for a description of all the included datasets.

figshare
Show threadTatu LeppämäkiMar 28
Thank you to #Kone & Mai and Tor Nessling Foundations for supporting this work. A quantitative work like this would not be possible without a robust suite of FOSS tools. My thanks to the maintainers of #QGIS, #pandas, #geopandas, #duckdb, #dask, #statsmodels, #jupyter and many more!
Show threadTatu LeppämäkiMar 28

BONUS
Random highlights from the dataset:
1) Median time between capturing a photo and uploading it to Flickr is one week.
2) People (or bots) like to upload on round figures (see pic)
3) Normalized by population, Iceland has the most Flickr users in our dataset.

BTW, I tried to explain the plots also in the alt texts; they might help if some of the plots don't make sense.