Challenges and opportunities of the spatiotemporal responses to the global pandemic of COVID-19

As a once-in-100-years pandemic, COVID-19 is changing and reshaping the world. COVID-19 poses grand challenges to human society and drives us to invent new analytical tools to examine the spatiotemporal patterns of the complex system for theories, methodologies, and applications of interdisciplinary research (Yang et al. 2020). The U.S. (US) National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Spatiotemporal Innovation Center (STC) to conduct a spatiotemporal rapid response to address this global health crisis. Engaging various communities, a diverse team was formed to provide a comprehensive non-medical rapid response to the global COVID-19 pandemic for answering many physically and socially challenging questions. The international team formed by experts and participants from almost every US state and worldwide every time zone including the GeoComputation Center for Social Sciences at Wuhan University, Tsinghua University, the China Data Institute at Michigan, the University of Queensland in Australia, RMDS Lab at Los Angles, and many other institutions to achieve the objectives of (1) providing data support for the spatiotemporal study of COVID-19 at local, regional and global levels with information collected and integrated from different sources; (2) facilitating quantitative research on spatial spreading and impacts of COVID-19 with advanced methodology and technology; (3) promoting collaborative research on the spatiotemporal study of COVID-19 on the Spatial Data Lab and Dataverse platforms; and (4) building research capacity for future collaborative projects. In addition to research and development conducted, a series of webinars and a mini virtual workshop were organized to introduce findings and solicit community feedback. This Special Issue is organized to capture such new developments and findings with a focus on the spatiotemporal analysis of the impact of COVID-19. Research presented in this issue includes studies on theories, methodologies, data and applications, which together help understand the short-term and long-term impacts of COVID-19 on health, demographics, socioeconomics, environment, politics and other fields over space and time. The first four papers studied the space-time patterns of the pandemic’s impacts in different regions of the world (India/Subramanian et al. this issue, China/Pei et al. this issue, United States/Batta et al. this issue, and 12 secondary cities in 10 developing countries across Africa, Asia and South America/Laituri et al. this issue), examining not only the virus infected cases (Pei et al. this issue) but also the excess death of other diseases (Batta et al. this issue), as well as the pandemic’s social, economic and environmental impacts (Laituri et al. this issue). The last four papers explored social media or human mobility data (Shen et al. this issue) in search for their spatiotemporal relationships with COVID-19 transmission (Zhang et al. this issue), non-infectious diseases (Mu et al. this issue), and air quality in an urban metropolis (Li et al. 2022). At the end of the rapid response project and special issue editing process, we organized a mini workshop with approximately 35 participants to discuss the relevant opportunities and challenges of the pandemic response from a spatiotemporal perspective. This editorial ummarizes the findings, challenges, and opportunities from the perspectives of physical and social challenges, data collection, infrastructure operation, computing research, research replication, and community engagement in the COVID-19 rapid response. Social structure and vulnerability as well as convergence science are also practiced as critical components of the COVID-19 rapid response.