Call for papers

Quantitative methods in health geography – development and application

Dr. Melanie Tomintz, Geoinformation, Carinthia University of Applied Sciences (m.tomintz[at]cuas.at)

It is known that the health of people is heavily influenced by their surrounding environment. Therefore, research in the area of health geography is a broad and fast growing research discipline addressing topics such as the spread of diseases, health facility planning, adequate allocation of resources, tackling health inequalities and how the environment may influence people's health. There are different ways on how to approach health geography research and one is to use quantitative methods, which are highly supportive in this research area.

Hence, this session seeks abstracts in the area of health/medical geography with the focus on quantitative methods. Attention should be given to the development of new methods in the area of health geography and also on various application areas where quantitative methods play a major role. Therefore, papers are invited but not limited to the following topics:

• New developments in quantitative methods for health geographic research
• Spatial modelling of access to and usage of health facilities
• Spatial simulation of diseases and health risks
• Privacy issues in quantitative health research

Please submit your abstract (up to a maximum of 1 page) to Dr Melanie Tomintz (via email to m.tomintz[at]cuas.at)

Networking the World: Concepts, methods, data

Myriam Baron (baron[at]parisgeo.cnrs.fr) and Laurent Beauguitte (beauguittelaurent[at]parisgeo.cnrs.fr) both at the CNRS UMR Géographie-cités, University Paris Diderot, France

To catch human and environmental processes of globalization, working on world scale became more and more frequent during the last third decades. Part of these studies focused mainly on relations between actors. Analyzing these relations implies to define distance(s) in what could be called the ‘World-System’. On one hand, it can be based on the intensity of links regardless to physical distance. On the other hand, spatial proximities still matter when the structure of world flows is analyzed.

In this session, it could be interesting to examine the recent ‘state of art’ regarding worldwide networks (economic, migrants, financial, scientific, political etc.). A first topic could concern data available on world scale and their degree of relevance. A second one could focus on concepts and methods commonly used to study these networks (scale-free and small-world networks, measures of centrality etc.). And, last but not least, a third one could consider the varied fields of application, main geographical results, and ways they reveal (or not) same world patterns. Therefore, papers could cope with following topics:

• Critical examination on data available for specific fields of studies
• Relevance of concepts coming from social network analysis and study of complex networks
• Methods to highlight structures at a world level
• Empirical studies on world flows and links

Please submit your abstract (up to a maximum of 1 page) to Myriam Baron and Laurent Beauguitte (via email to baron[at]parisgeo.cnrs.fr and beauguittelaurent[at]parisgeo.cnrs.fr)

Spatial simulation in geography: agent-based modelling, geocomputational experiments and evaluation protocols

Thomas LOUAIL and Arnaud BANOS, CNRS, UMR Géographie-Cités, Paris

For more than 15 years agent-based modelling and simulation have gained importance in quantitative geography to become widely adopted for modelling distributed, self-organizing spatial phenomena. From land-use and cover change models to pedestrian daily trajectories in the urban space, from residential dynamics to cities and networks long-term dynamics, from locations of firms to urban sprawl, etc. there are numerous examples of geographical questions that have been tackled by agent-based models. In addition to the conception of highly simplified and virtual microworlds, useful to study theoretical spatial questions and test explanatory hypothesis, the progressive integration of layers of spatial data now allows to reason more accurately on real-world situations and evaluate prospective scenarios.

Parallel to the development of their applications to a broader panel of geographical questions, there are still huge methodological questions that have to be solved in order to gain confidence in agent-based simulation as a plain research tool on geographical complex phenomena. Those issues include: the articulation of knowledge associated at different levels of abstraction and/or different levels of spatial organization in computable geographical ontologies; the need of shared, well-documented and multi-level evaluation protocols; the inclusion of a variety of space and time scales in the models.

The goal of this session is to exchange on current concerns in this field of research, at the crossroads of geographical theory, geomatics, geocomputation, geosimulation, advances in computer modelling paradigms and computer simulation software. Our topics of interest in this session are both methodological and applicative. They include without being limited to:

• applications of agent-based simulation to study real world spatial phenomena (urban dynamics and growth, spatial economy, natural resource management and risk analysis, spatial processes related to the renewable energy and the green economy, climate change, health concerns and epidemiology)
• models docking and replication of past experiments of “classic” / well-known agent-based models
• articulation of multiple levels of spatial organization / abstraction in the models
• coupling of GIS data and agent-based models
• evaluation protocols for simulation results
• tools and workflows dedicated to the automation of the modelling process and numerical experimentation

Please submit your abstract (up to a maximum of 1 page) to Thomas Louail and Arnaud Banos (via email to louail[at]parisgeo.cnrs.fr and arnaud.banos[at]parisgeo.cnrs.fr)