Geocomputation, reproducible research and open tools to inform the transition away from fossil fuels

Economics of Low-Carbon Markets workshop

Key concepts

  • Geocomputation and spatial data science for research and evidence-based policies

  • Open source software and research

  • Reproducibility

  • From research to impact

A bit about me

OpenGeoHub

Source: Tidy geographic data course notes from OpenGeoHub 2023, building on Geocomputation with R Lovelace, Nowosad, and Muenchow (2019).

Geocomputation

Geocomputation is the application and development of computational methods for geographic data processing, analysis, modeling and visualisation with command-line tools and scripts, focussed on performance, reproducibility and modularity

Source: Geocomputation with R (Lovelace, Nowosad, and Muenchow 2019)

library(leaflet)
popup = c("Robin", "Jakub", "Jannes")
leaflet() |>
  addProviderTiles("NASAGIBS.ViirsEarthAtNight2012") |>
  addMarkers(lng = c(-3, 23, 11),
             lat = c(52, 53, 49), 
             popup = popup)

Open source books

For more open source books see bookdown.org

Reproducibility

Economics of Low Carbon Markets

  • Multidisciplinary event focused on the economics of low carbon markets

  • Methodological and empirical research

  • On multiple geographic scales

  • How can geocomputation help?

Open tools in the wild

Open collaboration

Why open collaboration?

  • Open communication + sharing can lead to new collaborations

  • Cas study: paper with statisticians on modelling transport safety (Gilardi et al. 2022)

Asking questions in an open forum

Source: https://github.com/r-spatial/sf/issues/966

GitHub for collaborative research

GitHub is not just for programmers (Braga et al. 2023)

Tools for collaboration

Collaborative writing platorms

Open source social media

Open source -> options

Quarto

  • These slides were built with quarto
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## Abstract

Source: https://github.com/Robinlovelace/presentations/blob/master/oldenburg-2023.qmd

Low carbon research

Tools for low carbon transport planning

  • Bid for funding outside our comfort zone (2014)
  • Development of a prototype tool (2015)
  • Lauch of national tool as part of investment strategy (2017)
  • Addition of travel to school (2019)
  • Extension to Wales, Scotland, Republic of Ireland, Portugal (2020+)

Policy impact

The power of geographic data

Enables understanding of distributional impacts of policies, e.g. agglomeration. Source: Moreno-Monroy, Lovelace, and Ramos (2018)

Generating accessibility data

Disaggregating origin-destination data

Souce: Lovelace et al (2022) ‘Jittering: A Computationally Efficient Method for Generating Realistic Route Networks from Origin-Destination Data’.

A larger OD dataset

Resulting networks

Open tools to inform policy

Live demo

Open question

How can Geocomputation be better used to support low carbon economics research?

Source: Morton et al. 2018 ‘Fuel Price Differentials and Car Ownership: A Spatial Analysis of Diesel Cars in Northern Ireland’.

More info

See slides online at robinlovelace.net/presenations/oldenburg-2023.html

For more on zoning systems, see: Lovelace, Robin, Martijn Tennekes, and Dustin Carlino. 2022. “ClockBoard: A Zoning System for Urban Analysis.” Journal of Spatial Information Science, no. 24 (June): 63–85. https://doi.org/10.5311/JOSIS.2022.24.172.

For more on Geocomputation with R, see https://r.geocompx.org, and join our Discord server at https://discord.gg/PMztXYgNxp

References

Braga, Pedro Henrique Pereira, Katherine Hébert, Emma J. Hudgins, Eric R. Scott, Brandon P. M. Edwards, Luna L. Sánchez Reyes, Matthew J. Grainger, et al. 2023. “Not Just for Programmers: How GitHub Can Accelerate Collaborative and Reproducible Research in Ecology and Evolution.” Methods in Ecology and Evolution 14 (6): 1364–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.14108.
Gilardi, Andrea, Jorge Mateu, Riccardo Borgoni, and Robin Lovelace. 2022. “Multivariate Hierarchical Analysis of Car Crashes Data Considering a Spatial Network Lattice.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) 185 (3): 1150–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/rssa.12823.
Lovelace, Robin, Jakub Nowosad, and Jannes Muenchow. 2019. Geocomputation with r. CRC Press. https://r.geocompx.org.
Lovelace, Robin, Martijn Tennekes, and Dustin Carlino. 2022. “ClockBoard: A Zoning System for Urban Analysis.” Journal of Spatial Information Science, no. 24 (June): 63–85. https://doi.org/10.5311/JOSIS.2022.24.172.
Moreno-Monroy, Ana I., Robin Lovelace, and Frederico R. Ramos. 2018. “Public Transport and School Location Impacts on Educational Inequalities: Insights from São Paulo.” Journal of Transport Geography 67 (February): 110–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2017.08.012.