Editorial

Abstract

The September 2022 issue of the Journal of Spatial Science is always an important issue as it includes announcement of the winner of the Best Research Paper Award made by the Journal of Spatial Science Editorial Board. The award is made annually based upon peer reviewed research and review papers published in the twelvemonth period from 1 July 2021 to 30 June 2022. Details of the Award are contained in this issue. Once again, it comes time to farewell one of our valued members of the Editorial Board. Dr Florence Tupin, Professor at Télécom Paris, has served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Spatial Science for several years and has contributed her expertise to peer review of many submissions in her field. Dr Tupin’s dedication to quality and inciteful approach to peer review and manuscript development is greatly appreciated. Impact factors for 2021 have also been released with the Journal of Spatial Science maintaining a steady impact factor of 1.840 accompanied by an improvement to Q3 in the Geography, physical category. Thank you for the support provided by our authors, subscribers and Editorial Board Members. Papers published in this issue provide interesting insights into current research and practice in the spatial sciences. Polyconic map projections are rarely used for world maps because traditional polyconic mappings do not have a favourable distortion pattern. This paper by Kerkovits demonstrates that the generalised versions of these projections can be adjusted well for global maps. The formulae are optimised numerically to ensure that the projections have as low distortion as possible. Furthermore, optimal polyconic mappings with further restrictions (e.g. rectangular graticules, equal-area) are also developed. Jouybari, Bagherbandi and Nilfouroushan use three different procedures to analyse the effect of IMU and GNSS uncertainties on their final adjusted results. The outcome suggests that the method of block-wise GNSS shift correction is a better method for aerial triangulation. A comparison of checkpoint RMS residuals shows that the block-wise solution is on average 6 cm more accurate than the strip-wise solution. Rosas and colleagues evaluated the use of low-cost materials for radiometric calibration of multispectral images. Four materials were tested: plywood panels painted with matte paint; plywood panels covered with synthetic nappa leather; ethylene vinyl acetate panels, and plywood panels covered with polyvinyl chloride canvas. The useful life of all materials and errors associated with their calibration were determined. The standard algorithm for generating nearest-neighbour models determines the distance between every pair of nodes, resulting in quadratic running time. Such time complexity is common among spatial problems and impedes the generation of larger JOURNAL OF SPATIAL SCIENCE 2022, VOL. 67, NO. 3, 355–357 https://doi.org/10.1080/14498596.2022.2107803