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Uncertainty in geospatial health: challenges and opportunities ahead

Uncertainty is not always well captured, understood, or modeled properly, and can bias the robustness of complex relationships, such as the association between the environment and public health through exposure, estimates of geographic accessibility and cluster detection, to name a few. We review current challenges and future opportunities as geospatial data and analyses are applied to the field of public health. We are particularly interested in the sources of uncertainty in geospatial data and how this uncertainty may propagate in spatial analysis. We present opportunities to reduce the magnitude and impact of uncertainty. Specifically, we focus on (1) the use of multiple reference data sources to reduce geocoding errors, (2) the validity of online geocoders and how confidentiality (e.g., HIPAA) may be breached, (3) use of multiple reference data sources to reduce geocoding errors, (4) the impact of geoimputation techniques on travel estimates, (5) residential mobility and how it affects accessibility metrics and clustering, and (6) modeling errors in the American Community Survey. Our paper discusses how to communicate spatial and spatiotemporal uncertainty, and high-performance computing to conduct large amounts of simulations to ultimately increase statistical robustness for studies in public health. Our paper contributes to recent efforts to fill in knowledge gaps at the intersection of spatial uncertainty and public health.

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Vape Shop Proliferation and Noncompliance in Pennsylvania: A Pre- and Post-tax Analysis.

Background:The growing use of electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) among adolescents is a public health concern. Taxation of these products is a viable approach to reduce ENDS use, particularly among adolescents. Opponents of taxation posit that it puts specialty retailers (ie, vape shops) out of business, thereby reducing availability of ENDS for adult smokers seeking harm reduction. Pennsylvania enacted substantial ENDS taxes in October 2016. This study sought to examine (1) the prevalence of Pennsylvania vape shops before and after ENDS taxes were enacted and (2) ENDS retail licensing compliance among vape shops.Methods:We employed standardized searches for vape shops in Pennsylvania on the Yelp business-listing platform a month prior to and for 18 consecutive months following the imposition of ENDS taxes. We then compared listings to a public database of ENDS-related retail licenses to determine compliance status.Results:The number of listed vape shops increased in a linear fashion by a magnitude of 23%. In addition, when we compared a final listing of retailers to data from the state tax authority, we found roughly a quarter (22%-29%) of vape shops to be noncompliant with maintaining a valid ENDS retail license.Conclusions:Overall, ENDS taxation in Pennsylvania has not appeared to reduce prevalence of vape shops as anticipated. However, stricter enforcement of the tax law is necessary to ensure compliance among retailers. These findings have implications for implementation and enforcement of ENDS tax policy nationwide, including states that currently lack such policies.

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North American birds require mitigation and adaptation to reduce vulnerability to climate change

AbstractIn an emerging climate crisis, effective conservation requires both adaptation and mitigation to improve the resilience of species. The currently pledged emissions reductions outlined in the Paris Agreement framework would still lead to a +3.2°C increase in global mean temperature by the end of this century. In this context, we assess the vulnerability of 604 North American bird species and identify the species and locations most at risk under climate change. We do this based on species distribution models for both the breeding and nonbreeding seasons, projected under two global warming scenarios (an optimistic mitigation scenario 1.5°C and an unmitigated 3.0°C scenario). We evaluate vulnerability under each season and scenario by assessing sensitivity and adaptive capacity based on modeled range loss and range gain, respectively, and based on species specific dispersal abilities. Our study, the first of its magnitude, finds that over two‐thirds of North American birds are moderately or highly vulnerable to climate change under a 3.0°C scenario. Of these climate‐vulnerable species, 76% would have reduced vulnerability and 38% of those would be considered nonvulnerable if warming were stabilized at 1.5°C. Thus, the current pledge in greenhouse gas reductions set by the Paris Agreement is inadequate to reduce vulnerability to North American birds. Additionally, if climate change proceeds on its current trajectory, arctic birds, waterbirds, and boreal and western forest birds will be highly vulnerable to climate change, groups that are currently not considered of high conservation concern. There is an urgent need for both (a) policies to mitigate emissions and (b) prioritization to identify where to focus adaptation actions to protect birds in a changing climate.

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Risk to North American birds from climate change‐related threats

AbstractClimate change is a significant threat to biodiversity globally. Here, we assessed the risk to 544 birds in the United States from future climate change‐related threats under a mitigation‐dependent global warming scenario of 1.5°C and an unmitigated scenario of 3.0°C. Threats considered included sea level rise, human land cover conversion, and extreme weather events. We identified potential impacts to individual species by overlaying future bird ranges with threats to calculate the proportion of species' ranges affected, and mapped a place‐based index of risk based on hazard (coincident threats), exposure (potential species richness), and vulnerability (potential richness of vulnerable species). Extreme weather events had the most extensive spatial coverage and contribution to risk, but urbanization and sea level rise also had disproportionate impacts on species relative to their coverage. With unmitigated climate change, multiple coincident threats affected over 88% of the area of the conterminous United States, and 97% of species could be affected by two or more climate‐related threats. Some habitat groups will see up to 96% of species facing three or more threats. Species of conservation concern also faced more threats regardless of climate change scenario. However, climate change mitigation would reduce risk to birds from climate change‐related threats across over 90% of the US.

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Twitter and Academic Geography through the Lens of #AAG2018

Twitter has emerged as a global social network of active users who share conversations with one another in an online setting. Academics are one community that has increasingly taken to Twitter as a means of connecting with other scholars, sharing research, and obtaining meaningful feedback. Tweeting has become especially popular during academic conferences where conference attendees use Twitter hashtags to filter conference conversations into a separate dialogue. For geographers, the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) represents one such occasion to use Twitter to discuss contemporary developments in geographic research. In this article, we provide an overview of Twitter as well as the ways in which the academic community uses the platform. Following this, we discuss the tweets sent using the hashtag for the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting, #AAG2018. To analyze these tweets, we collected all tweets with this hashtag for a period of four weeks and examined the content using word clouds and sentiment analysis to explore general feelings and trends associated with geography and the AAG Annual Meeting. We conclude with suggestions for future research avenues that could use Twitter data to gauge the pulse of the geographic discipline. Key Words: academic conferences, American Association of Geographers, geography, sentiment analysis, Twitter.

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