Agriculture, whether in the Corn Belt of the United States, the massive rice producing areas of Southeast Asia, or the bean harvest of a smallholder producer in Central America, is the basis for feeding the world. Agriculture systems are highly complex and heterogeneous in both space and time. The need to contextualize this complexity and to make more informed decisions regarding agriculture has led to GIS&T approaches supporting the agricultural sciences in many different areas. Agriculture represents a rich resource of spatiotemporal data and different problem contexts; current and future GIScientists should look toward agricultural as a potentially rewarding area of investigation and, likewise, one where new approaches have the potential to help improve the food, environmental, and economic security of people around the world.
Geographic Information Systems and Technology are utilized extensively in the business sector and have become a strategic element for competition and partnering. Although the traditional digital map layers and tables remain at the core of business GIS, the spatial architecture in firms now includes location analytics, location intelligence, AI, machine learning, imagery, social media linkages. Cloud-based solutions provide platform flexibility, centralized data, and potential to roll out user-friendly webGIS across large segments of business users and customers. GIS is well suited to the digital transformations that are essential for firms, large and small. With these advances, GIS has become prominent and its function has moved upwards in companies’ organizational hierarchies, with enterprise GIS even being recognized in the C-suite. UPS is an example in which GIS is now a critical corporate competitive factor. In spite of these successes, a gap remains in the supply of skilled spatial workforce for companies. Business schools can contribute by changing by school leadership “getting it” about spatial, bringing GIS into the mainstream curricula, developing training for business faculty in teaching, conducting research in location analytics, and populating student body and alumni base with knowledge and enthusiasm for spatial thinking and management.
Public participation geographic information science (PPGIS) has been presented as an alternative to the technocratic methods and tools of GIS. It draws on the generative knowledge practices which emerge when people are clustered together in relation to a decisionmaking practice by intentionally taking part in spatial activities related to the decision. This is a wide context, under which it is important for PPGIS practitioners to reflect on the concepts of “public” and “participation”, adapting their theoretical and practical frameworks to suit the goals and aims of each project. Instead of assuming that including publics will always lead to better quality and more just or democratic outcomes, researchers are encouraged to reflect on the broader geographic and political strategies of involving publics in their work, paying particular attention to building trust and acceptance of PPGIS amongst affected populations. Key to successful participatory GIS is a recognition that whilst everyone is expert in their own lives, conventional practices – including but not limited to those within the spatial sciences – have historically served to privilege specific types of knowledge claim at the expense of others, subjugating the kinds of experiential accounts of place and matter which high-quality PPGIS is able to generate.