Alex de Sherbinin, associate director for Science Applications at Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) and deputy manager of NASA's Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), is guest editor of a special Issue of the journal Sustainability on climate risk and vulnerability mapping, with co-editor Stefan Kienberger of the University of Salzburg. He is also a co-author of one of the papers in the special issue, on using flood disaster data to validate components of social vulnerability to floods. The paper’s lead author is Earth Institute Fellow Beth Tellman.
The paper "Still in Need of Norms: The State of the Data in Citizen Science" has been published in the journal Citizen Science: Theory and Practice. Anne Bowser of the Wilson Center is lead author, and de Sherbinin is a co-author. The article is a major output of the CODATA-World Data System (WDS) Task Group on Citizen Science and the Validation, Curation, and Management of Crowdsourced Data, which de Sherbinin co-chaired in 2016–2018.
Senior digital archivist Robert Downs is a co-author of the report, "Laying the Groundwork for Developing International Community Guidelines to Effectively Share and Reuse Digital Data Quality Information—Case Statement, Workshop Summary Report, and Path Forward," published in Open Science Foundation (OSF) Preprints. Ge Peng of the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Information Quality Cluster is lead author. The report, which stems from a pre-workshop held in July 2020 prior to the ESIP Summer Meeting, describes the approach that will be taken to develop community guidelines for preparing and sharing data quality information.
The Geo-Referenced Infrastructure and Demographic Data for Development (GRID3) program managed by CIESIN has released the white paper, "Harmonizing Subnational Boundaries," on GRID3 efforts to support the harmonization, production, and use of digitized legal/administrative units, operational units, and statistical areas. This work addresses three primary areas: improving and harmonizing operational units; fostering improved collaboration on boundary harmonization among disparate government bodies; and using boundaries harmonization to support census efforts. The paper focuses on case studies in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Zambia.