@karasov
Geographer at Aalto University. Non-material values of nature, outdoor recreation, big data, crowdsourcing, landscape aesthetics, remote sensing, natural language processing. IPBES Transformative Change fellow. 🇺🇦 🇵🇹 🇪🇪 🇫🇮
This idea, borrowed from the economics of culture, helps make intangible values of nature visible.
We also outline a vision for 'PPGIS 2.0', transforming participatory mapping into a recommendation service for outdoor activities. We warmly welcome your feedback! Preprint: doi.org/10.31235/osf...
This is the vision @htenkanen.bsky.social and I explore in our new #Ukrainability preprint. Our solution is to treat cultural ecosystem services as the extra quality of time a person spends connected with the environment. This creates a metric, if time in nature feels 'wasted' or 'well spent'.
What if we had a 'Spotify for nature'? 🏞️ A system that could recommend high-quality outdoor experiences tailored to our preferences, while also providing precious data for sustainable environmental management?
The broader point: carefully enriching any mobile big data (Twitter is just one example) with temporal and environmental context can reveal complex mobility patterns. This opens new paths to understand transnational lifestyles and to support cross-border cohesion in Europe and beyond.
By testing 100 different model variations, we found the best-performing model, which relatively accurately identified home and work locations. Parameters that looked best under manual validation were not those that best matched aggregated official statistics. Manual validation matters!
We developed a new framework that enriches sparse, geolocated Twitter data by integrating it with universally available data sources: satellite imagery and time-use survey data, to better predict daily activity locations of people.
In our new @ijgis.bsky.social paper, @ollejarv.bsky.social and I analysed 9M geolocated tweets from the Greater Region of Luxembourg within the #BORDERSPACE project at the @digigeolab.bsky.social, funded by the Research Council of Finland and @koneensaatio.fi.
How can we accurately map where people live and work when they frequently cross national borders? Traditional surveys miss complexity, mobile network operators data are hard to get across borders, and individual social-media traces are sparse—yet social media is inherently transnational.
In the final session of #ECTQG we have @karasov.bsky.social presenting his work on measuring the quality of time spent in nature. Very interesting stuff!
🌟 Exciting Update! The laid-out version of the @ipbes.net #TransformativeChange Report Summary for Policymakers (English) is now available! 🧪🌍
Dive into comprehensive insights on biodiversity loss & transformative pathways for just & sustainable futures.
Access here: www.ipbes.net/transformati...
Mobile messengers like Telegram offer a safe and inclusive way to engage communities in participatory mapping during wartime.
Explore the interactive map at ukrainability.space
More updates coming soon! #Ukrainability
At #LBS2025, hosted by @aalto.fi, I presented early results from the waterfront areas in Kremenchuk city (Central Ukraine). Using a Telegram-based bot, we mapped where people go outdoors and how they rate the quality of these experiences in collaboration with 🇺🇦 experts and municipality.
As part of #Ukrainability project together with @htenkanen.bsky.social, @ollejarv.bsky.social, and Tiina Rinne we study how people use cultural ecosystem services in Ukraine and how they perceive the quality of these experiences during the full-scale Russian invasion.
What truly made this fellowship special was the collaborative environment. Working alongside such brilliant minds has been genuinely inspiring, and I look forward to building upon these insights in future work.
#IPBES #Biodiversity #Sustainability #EnvironmentalResearch
The analysis showed industries focused on instrumental values (mining, shipping, tourism, fashion to name a few) were more likely using sustainability for marketing, compared to content about mangrove forests, wetlands and biodiversity conservation.
My specific contribution was analysing social media discourse using zero-shot modelling on Twitter data. I revealed how different sectors engage with environmental concepts - with some interesting findings about greenwashing potential.
Our work involved collecting diverse visions from economic, spiritual, and academic texts, artistic expressions and social media. We analysed whether these visions could truly reshape human-nature relationships and address the root drivers of biodiversity loss.
It has been quite the remarkable experience serving as an @ipbes.net fellow, contributing to research on visions of better futures for people and nature. The #TransformativeChange report is now released: www.ipbes.net/transformati...
The scientific entourage of the Digital Geography Lab members and alumni in front of the Dipoli building at Aalto University in Espoo, Finland. Front row from the left: Henrikki Tenkanen, Davi Gressler, Leyi Xu Back row from the left: Oleksandr Karasov, Milad Malekzadeh, Robert Klein, Tatu Leppämäki, Matti Hästbacka and yours truly.
Second day of #LBS2025 is about to start and so are the @digigeolab.bsky.social presentations.
Oleksandr describing the context of his study at Location Based Services conference.
Oleksandr showing preliminary results from the first month of data collection.
Next up at #LBS2025 is our alumni member @karasov.bsky.social presenting his work on exploring cultural ecosystem services in #Ukraine using #PPGIS data collected from #Telegram.
Save the date: the Society for Social-Ecological Systems is launching on March 27, 2025, at 3:30pm Central African Time. Register for the online launch event now.
Save the date! Celebrate the launch of SocSES with us – and learn more about our plans for building a home for SES research with you.
📅 Date: Thursday, 27 March 2025
⏰ Time: 15:30 – 17:00 Central African Time
📍 Location: Online (Zoom)
Register for the online launch event: lnkd.in/dDCR33DN
Three years of unimaginable loss, resilience, and courage.
#StandWithUkraine
We have just opened an exciting PhD position in GeoAI & LLMs and are looking for motivated PhD candidates! The PhD work will be supervised by me and Nico Van de Weghe from the GeoAI Research Center, Ghent University.
Apply by March 2nd, 2025 from here (+ more details): www.aalto.fi/en/open-posi...
Thank you so much to whoever put this very comprehensive list of #science Bsky starter packs together. This is just amazing: docs.google.com/document/d/1...
Are you a #geographer or somehow involved with #geospatial stuff? Come to Location Based Services #LBS2025 conference in Espoo, Finland.
Abstract and showcase DL are in early February 2025, so plenty of time to brew a great idea!
#GIS #GIScience #Geoinformatics #Location #Geography #BigData
