NZPR Special Geospatial Edition out now

NZPR Vol 50 is a special edition packed with papers using geospatial methods, from an Extreme Events Index for Aotearoa, to checking geospatial accuracy in health data.

Guest-edited by Jesse Whitehead and Matt Hobbs, the eleven papers fall under four themes: geospatial accuracy and classification, healthy environments and access to services, looking back in time, and future directions.

Two papers, by Phoebe Eggleton et al., and Gabrielle Davie et al., focus on a critical but sometimes overlooked issue: the importance of geospatial accuracy and classification in health research, highlighting the need for a continued focus on precision in geospatial data to avoid potentially misleading conclusions in health research.

This edition also includes four studies examining healthy environments and equitable access to services, especially for underserved populations are highlighted through novel data and approaches. Jesse Wiki et al., appreciates the importance of connection to the land for Māori by examining access and availability of environmental factors for tamariki and rangatahi Māori. Troy Ruhe et al., analyse how young Pacific Peoples live closer to both health-promoting and health-constraining features compared with non-Māori/non-Pacific populations. Agrani Ratnayake Kumar et al. show how ethnicity and deprivation may have an impact on the availability of endoscopic sinus surgery in the Waikato. Miller et. al. look at the development of a web app looking at the rural-urban divide in Covid-19 vaccination. 

We are reminded of the importance of looking back in time by Bingyu (Susie) Deng et al. and by Lars Brabyn and Charisse Camacho Hanson. Both studies use data, including historic data, to offer a valuable historical and contemporary context for understanding how socio-economic deprivation and migration patterns have transformed over time in Aotearoa New Zealand, informing future research and policy.

The remaining papers take a forward-focused view, including Malcolm Campbell‘s discussion of new, detailed spatio-temporal data sources, such as mobile phone location data, and big geospatial data. Tessa Pocock et al. outline the development of a new virtual tool that assesses the street environment from a falls-risk perspective. And we are delighted to include the winner of the 2023 Jacoby Prize, Heather McLeod, for her paper co-authored with her Masters supervisor James Renwick, ‘Linking people and climate: The Extreme Events Climate Index for Aotearoa for Stats NZ geographies and iwi rohe’. 

See the full contents and download list here, as well as more information on how to submit to NZPR.