This article presents a discussion of the emerging ethical issue of geodata privacy in geographical research. The paper highlights the importance of considering challenges to privacy when working with geographically explicit data and explores explicit ways in which researchers and practitioners can be conscious of these issues. Through summarising the key problems in this area and presenting outstanding open research areas and questions from a seminar series on geodata privacy, we highlight important considerations for future research in this field. We focus on the specific topics of appropriate anonymization, responsible data dissemination, the balance between data sharing and privacy, and the challenges posed by working across international contexts. We conclude by recommending approaches to manage various legal and ethical frameworks, raise the importance of the international context, and inspire future research to address the challenges of safeguarding sensitive geodata while promoting openness and transparency.

A survey, aimed at Swedish researchers in the field of spatial data, was conducted in 2021. 113 individuals responded to the questionnaire, which gives us insight into how researchers in the field view; sharing of data, how they work with data, which metadata they think are central and what support they ask for in order to be able to handle spatial data.

According to the survey a majority of the researchers share and use data shared by others in their research. Central metadata that is emphasized are coordinate systems, projections, time of the information, data capture, data content and author. The question of how to make data available is very varied among the respondents. The questionnaire responses contain a wide range of individual solutions to make the information available. A majority of researchers believe that the work with data management and accessibility has increased over the past 5 years. As an obstacle to working more with this is time, but there are also other obstacles. The researchers are seeking additional support that can be summarized as: support, technical guidance, storage, information, time and money.

En enkätundersökning genomfördes under 2021. Den var riktad till svenska forskare inom fältet rumsliga data. 113 individer svarade på enkäten som ger oss insikt hur forskare inom fältet ser på tillgängliggörande av data, hur man arbetar med data, vilka metadata man tycker är centrala och vilket stöd man efterfrågar för att kunna hantera specifikt rumsliga data.

Bland huvudresultaten från enkäten kan nämnas att en majoritet av forskarna delar och använder data som delats av andra i sin forskning. Centrala metadata som man framhåller är koordinatsystem, projektioner, tidpunkt för informationen, datafångst, datainnehåll och upphovsman. Frågan om hur man tillgängliggör data är mycket varierande bland respondenterna. I enkätsvaren återfinns en lång rad individuella lösningar för att kunna tillgängliggöra informationen. En majoritet av forskarna menar att arbetet med datahantering och tillgängliggörandet har ökat under de senaste 5 åren. Hinder för att arbeta mer med detta menar man är tid, men det finns också andra hinder. Forskarna efterlyser ytterligare stöd som kan sammanfattas som: stöd/support, teknisk vägledning, lagring, information, tid och pengar.

Land use is a cornerstone of human civilization, but also intrinsically linked to many global sustainability challenges—from climate change to food security to the ongoing biodiversity crisis. Understanding the underlying technological, institutional and economic drivers of land-use change, and how they play out in different environmental, socio-economic and cultural contexts, is therefore important for identifying effective policies to successfully address these challenges. In this regard, much can be learned from studying long-term land-use change. We examined the evolution of European land management over the past 200 years with the aim of identifying (1) key episodes of changes in land management, and (2) their underlying technological, institutional and economic drivers. To do so, we generated narratives elaborating on the drivers of land use-change at the country level for 28 countries in Europe. We qualitatively grouped drivers into land-management regimes, and compared changes in management regimes across Europe. Our results allowed discerning seven land-management regimes, and highlighted marked heterogeneity regarding the types of management regimes occurring in a particular country, the timing and prevalence of regimes, and the conditions that result in observed bifurcations. However, we also found strong similarities across countries in the timing of certain land-management regime shifts, often in relation to institutional reforms (e.g., changes in EU agrarian policies or the emergence and collapse of the Soviet land management paradigm) or to technological innovations (e.g., drainage pipes, tillage and harvesting machinery, motorization, and synthetic fertilizers). Land reforms frequently triggered changes in land management, and the location and timing of reforms had substantial impacts on land-use outcomes. Finally, forest protection policies and voluntary cooperatives were important drivers of land-management changes. Overall, our results demonstrate that land-system changes should not be conceived as unidirectional developments following predefined trajectories, but rather as path-dependent processes that may be affected by various drivers, including sudden events.

The academic study of rural landscapes covers a broad range of academic disciplines and thematic, methodological and theoretical concerns and interests; including questions concerned with resource use (e.g. agriculture, forestry, water and mining), settlement, livelihoods, conflicts, conservation, culture and identity. This diversity is clearly a strength (the rich empirical and intellectual base), but also presents a challenge, as the dissemination of research findings is distributed through a plethora of publishing channels, which do not necessarily encourage exchange of results and ideas that are not already perceived as germane to already established academic networks.

Land use and land cover change (LUCC) has emerged as an important issue of global change with significant influences on the geochemical cycle and regional climate change. Understanding the historical changes of land use and analyzing the environmental effects of LUCC make such reconstructions important. Based on historical statistics, this article reconstructs cropland area at the municipality level (härad/kommun) in the Scandinavian Peninsula during 1875–1999. The total acreage of cropland increased 36.84 % during 1875–1930, kept stable during 1930–1950, and decreased 14.25 % during 1950–1999. The croplands of Sweden and Norway both increased before 1950 and changed in different ways during 1950–1999 when the cropland decreased by 19.79 % in Sweden but increased by 9.63 % in Norway. The counties in the south Scandinavian Peninsula owned most of the cropland, with a cropland proportion of over 20 %, and experienced relatively obvious cropland changes. Growth centers with a rate of increase of over 5 % during 1875–1910 were found in Skåne, Stockholm, the Uppsala counties in Sweden, and the area around Oslo county in Norway. The general cropland distribution showed almost no change during this period, which mainly reflects the suitability of the natural conditions for agriculture. Multi-social factors co-impacted land use activities and induced temporal and spatial variations of the cropland. These factors included food supply, world trade, wars, agriculture policies, the economic and political environment, urbanization, and national differences. Compared with the widely used global land use dataset Historical Database of the Global Environment (HYDE), this study shows different cropland change curves before 1950. This article is a case study showing that the hindcasting model of the HYDE dataset has difficulty estimating multi-determined cropland change in the Scandinavian Peninsula, and the empirical study contributes to the improvement of the accuracy of historical land use data at the regional level.