New publication hot off the press!

A scoping review on the multipicity of scale in spatial analysis

with Levi Wolf, Mehak Sachdeva, Sarah Bardin & Stewart Fotheringham

in the JGS special issue: "Scale and Spatial Analysis"

tl;dr there are multiple types of spatial scale concepts and related terminologies, but there are also many ways to combine/decompose multiple spatial scales in order to learn about spatial phenomena and this appears to be an important area for future research.

More specifically, scale is central to spatial analysis w/ huge diversity in how it is used. There is a vast literature and some core concepts have emerged. However, a recent trend is multiscale spatial analytics and there is much less consensus around what exactly is meant by multiscale. We searched for all papers within five 5 central geographical sciences journals that focus on spatial scale when using quantitative geographic methods. After sorting them into some general themes and categories, we highlighted the techniques that offer truly multiscale methods as opposed to “cross-scale” methods that make more informal comparisons. A benefit of multiscale methods is they allow us to conduct inferences on scale and quantify uncertainty about it. Another benefit is explicit combo of scales represents more complex patterns & processes. We close the paper by acknowledging these different "multiplicities " and offering a few suggestions on ways to continue formalizing multiscale spatial analytics. IMHO it's a super exciting area and I can't wait to see how it develops especially as these cutting edge models are developed, applied, & integrated into other tools, such as GeoAI. If you or anyone you know are working in this area, please drop a line! Would love to chat or have you present in ongoing seminar series on Spatial Multiscale Analytics, Applied Research, & technology (SMAART).