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The development of location-aware technologies, such as smartphones, raises serious questions regarding locational privacy and the ethical use of geographic data. The degree to which these concepts are taught in undergraduate geographic information science (GISci) courses is unknown. A survey of GISci educators shows that issues of privacy and ethics are important in a GISci education. However, a large proportion of GISci educators are not concerned about the loss of locational privacy and many do not devote classes to the subject. Those not teaching the subject cite lack of course time and the need for more information.

ABSTRACT.--The goal of this research was to develop a novel method to make use of ranked timber observation descriptions, which have been underutilized in survey reconstruction research. The new method [...]

Surface soil texture controls many important ecological, hydrological, and geomorphic processes in and regions and is therefore important from a land-management perspective. Soil survey efforts have traditionally fulfilled this need, but they are constrained by the size, remoteness, and inaccessibility of many and regions, which renders simple field measurements prohibitively expensive. This article compares several different predictive soil-mapping techniques with a sparse data set in order to develop surficial soil texture maps. Our results suggest that data collected at the landscape scale can be used as input to predictive soil-mapping techniques to create maps of soil texture at higher fidelity and a fraction of the cost than would be required using traditional methods. Key Words: predictive soil mapping, soil texture, soil survey, geostatistics, Joshua Tree National Park.

Church forests collectively represent the only surviving remnants of the original montane forest, serving as critical sanctuaries for many of Ethiopia's endangered and endemic plant and invertebrate taxa. Modern inventories of church forests suggest that they are vulnerable to degradation because of their small size and isolation. The aim of this study is to use historical air photos from the period of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1935-1941) to measure changes to church forests over a ~80-year time span. We find little evidence that church forests in the study region around Debra Tabor in the northern Ethiopia highlands are declining in size. Rather, church forests have proven to be remarkably resilient on the landscape despite decades of dramatic change to the world around them. Our findings, therefore, highlight the effectiveness of religion-based forest stewardship. Results also indicate, however, that while many church forests used to be buffered from intensive agricultural activity (e.g., cultivation and pasture) today, they find themselves significantly more isolated and vulnerable to edge effects as a result of a general decrease of trees and bushlands surrounding the forests. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]