Enhancing Participatory Development in Morocco: Analyzing the Sketch Mapping Behaviour of Men and Women and Integrating Paper and Digital Participatory Mapping Environments

Twelve participatory paper maps by separate groups of men and women were facilitated by the High Atlas Foundation in six communities in Morocco between 2010–2020 as part of their process of participatory development. In this research, these sketch maps are analyzed for the first time. The twelve participatory paper maps underwent a gender-focused content frequency analysis. Seven communities were located using OpenStreetMap and Google Maps by a High Atlas Foundation expert. It was found that men contributed more overall geographic elements and written Arabic commentary than women, which could indicate a higher level of familiarity with their community and comfortability in communicating their opinions in writing. It was also found that there are many barriers to adding data from the sketch maps to OpenStreetMap due to language, loss of institutional memory, inconsistencies between the sketch maps of the same location, and inconsistencies between the sketch maps and satellite imagery.

An integrative approach to mosquito dynamics reveals differences in people's everyday experiences of mosquitoes

Urban environments are heterogeneous landscapes of social and environmental features, with important consequences for human-nature entanglements, such as that of mosquito-borne disease. Investigations into this intra-urban heterogeneity in mosquito dynamics find conflicting results, likely due to the complex socio-ecological interactions and the importance of place-based context. Integrative research, which synthesizes multiple disciplines and epistemologies, can help place ecological results into their social context to explore these place-based differences. Here, we develop an integrative approach to understanding spatial patterns of mosquito burdens in urban systems by combining entomological surveys, semi-structured interviews, and sketch maps. Although we found no evidence for a difference in mosquito abundance across an urban gradient, there were differences in individuals' everyday experiences with mosquitoes. These differences were mediated by how individuals moved through public space and their vulnerability to hazards in these spaces. This example of integrative research illustrates what can be gained from the inclusion of multiple epistemologies, particularly for research in socio-ecological systems.

Geospatial Tool and Geocloud Platform Innovations: A Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration Assessment

The well-recognized and extensive task of mapping unrecorded land rights across sub-Saharan Africa demands innovative solutions. In response, the consortia of “its4land”, a European Commission Horizon 2020 project, developed, adapted, and tested innovative geospatial tools including (1) software underpinned by the smart Sketch maps concept, called SmartSkeMa; (2) a workflow for applying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV); and (3) a boundary delineator tool based on the UAV images. Additionally, the consortium developed (4) a platform called Publish and Share (PaS), enabling integration of all the outputs of tool sharing and publishing of land information through geocloud web services. The individual tools were developed, tested, and demonstrated based on requirements from Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Zanzibar. The platform was further tested by key informants and experts in a workshop in Rwanda after the AfricaGIS conference in 2019. With the project concluding in 2020, this paper seeks to undertake an assessment of the tools and the PaS platform against the elements of fit-for-purpose land administration. The results show that while the tools can function and deliver outputs independently and reliably, PaS enables interoperability by allowing them to be combined and integrated into land administration workflows. This feature is useful for tailoring approaches for specific country contexts. In this regard, developers of technical approaches tackling land administration issues are further encouraged to include interoperability and the use of recognized standards in designs.

The Sketch Map Tool Facilitates the Assessment of OpenStreetMap Data for Participatory Mapping

A worldwide increase in the number of people and areas affected by disasters has led to more and more approaches that focus on the integration of local knowledge into disaster risk reduction processes. The research at hand shows a method for formalizing this local knowledge via sketch maps in the context of flooding. The Sketch Map Tool enables not only the visualization of this local knowledge and analyses of OpenStreetMap data quality but also the communication of the results of these analyses in an understandable way. Since the tool will be open-source and several analyses are made automatically, the tool also offers a method for local governments in areas where historic data or financial means for flood mitigation are limited. Example analyses for two cities in Brazil show the functionalities of the tool and allow the evaluation of its applicability. Results depict that the fitness-for-purpose analysis of the OpenStreetMap data reveals promising results to identify whether the sketch map approach can be used in a certain area or if citizens might have problems with marking their flood experiences. In this way, an intrinsic quality analysis is incorporated into a participatory mapping approach. Additionally, different paper formats offered for printing enable not only individual mapping but also group mapping. Future work will focus on advancing the automation of all steps of the tool to allow members of local governments without specific technical knowledge to apply the Sketch Map Tool for their own study areas.

Exploring structure-property relationships in magnesium dissolution modulators

Small organic molecules that modulate the degradation behavior of Mg constitute benign and useful materials to modify the service environment of light metal materials for specific applications. The vast chemical space of potentially effective compounds can be explored by machine learning-based quantitative structure-property relationship models, accelerating the discovery of potent dissolution modulators. Here, we demonstrate how unsupervised clustering of a large number of potential Mg dissolution modulators by structural similarities and sketch-maps can predict their experimental performance using a kernel ridge regression model. We compare the prediction accuracy of this approach to that of a prior artificial neural networks study. We confirm the robustness of our data-driven model by blind prediction of the dissolution modulating performance of 10 untested compounds. Finally, a workflow is presented that facilitates the automated discovery of chemicals with desired dissolution modulating properties from a commercial database. We subsequently prove this concept by blind validation of five chemicals.

Assessing the Ability of Multidimensional Scaling and Pathfinder Networks to Measure Spatial Knowledge

Cognitive maps, or mental representations of external environments, aid spatial navigation. Typically, researchers study cognitive maps by having participants provide a sketched map. However, multidimensional scaling (MDS) and Pathfinder, statistical techniques which represent a set of input proximities as a n-dimensional space or a network, respectively, can both be used as measures of cognitive maps. Previous research with semantic knowledge suggests that Pathfinder is better than MDS for mental modelling. In the present study, participants drew maps of a familiar environment from memory and provided pairwise distance ratings for landmarks present in those locations. Using those distance ratings as inputs for MDS solutions and Pathfinder networks, the extent to which MDS and Pathfinder related to the participant sketch maps was assessed. Results indicated that MDS solutions were more highly correlated with sketch maps than were Pathfinder networks.

College Campuses and Student Walkability: Assessing the Impact of Smartphone Use on Student Perception and Evaluation of Urban Campus Routes

The purpose of this study is to assess the relationships between college campus walking route characteristics and student perceptions of them with smartphone use. The study used student sketch maps, survey questionnaires, and observations and measurements of route features on a Korean urban campus. The results show that the pedestrian perception and evaluation of campus walking routes are impacted differently in two conditions: walking with smartphone use and walking without smartphone use. “Smartphone walkers” found the safety and quality of routes more important, while walkers without phones considered the shortest distance and positive walking experience to be important factors in their route choices. Campus-built environments need to be improved to provide more adaptive solutions to respond to changes in pedestrian behavior and perception due to increased “smartphone walking”. Recommendations include a walker-friendly campus with well-connected streets and networks, separation from vehicles (ensuring safety), good quality sidewalks, and increased campus green space.