Submit a Manuscript to the Journal
International Journal of Digital Earth
For a Special Issue on
Data-Driven Public Health and Urban Sustainability
Manuscript deadline
30 December 2023

Special Issue Editor(s)
Dr. Lixia Chu,
Delft University of Technology
[email protected]
Dr. Christoph Lofi,
Delft University of Technology
[email protected]
Prof. Dr. Carola Hein,
Delft University of Technology
[email protected]
Data-Driven Public Health and Urban Sustainability
The Covid-19 pandemic and its consequences have promoted rethinking of questions of public health, urban sustainability, and urban planning. Understanding the relationship among socio-spatial, environmental and cultural factors is essential to guide planning, including to prevent future pandemics or other health issues. This includes uncovering unexpected patterns of influence that are often difficult to comprehensively study. For example, the lockdown policy--implemented to curb spreading of the virus—has resulted temporarily in reduced human activity and therewith improved urban environments including through better air quality, greening and mitigation of urban heat island effects. Analyzing such complex systems is challenging as it demands digitalising and processing data on socio-cultural and environmental factors, and requires multi-disciplinary collaboration. Also, data needed for such analysis often comes from multiple heterogenous sources, calling for data integration or data fusion workflows. Additionally, such datasets tend to be very big and multi-dimensional, making manual statistical analysis hard or infeasible. Here, data science and artificial intelligence methods can provide new approaches to process such high-dimensional multi-source data to uncover yet unknown patterns. To inform future actions, results achieved with such methods need to be understandable, verifiable, and explainable.
We launch this collection to promote communication and collaboration among scholars from multiple disciplines using novel methodologies, including data science and AI, to study data from a large variety of socio-cultural, public health and environmental factors in order to inform public health management, urban planning, and urban sustainability management themes.
- Machine learning, explainable AI, statistical approaches in the context of public health or urban planning / sustainability
- Data-driven public health, urban sustainability, urban planning
- Data-driven digital humanities including changes of socio, economic and cultural features over time
- Analysis of time series of environmental factors including air quality, vegetation, land surface temperature, land cover, etc.
- Multi-source data including earth observation data, socio-economic data, citizen science data, etc.
Looking to Publish your Research?
Find out how to publish your research open access with Taylor & Francis Group.
Choose open accessSubmission Instructions
The International Journal of Digital Earth is an Open Access and international peer-reviewed academic journal (SCIE with a 2021 impact factor 4.606) focusing on the theories, technologies, applications, and societal implications of Digital Earth and those visionary concepts that will enable a modelled virtual world.
Submissions must follow the instructions to authors outlined on the Taylor & Francis author guidelines page for International Journal of Digital Earth. Word templates are available on the web site and papers are typically 5000‐8000 words in length.
Papers should be submitted online at the International Journal of Digital Earth's Manuscript Central Site. New users should first create an account. Once a user is logged onto the site submissions should be made via the Author Centre. Please indicate the paper is submitted to Special Issue on “Data-Driven Public Health and Urban Sustainability” in the cover letter.
We look forward to your contributions. Please do not hesitate to contact the Guest Editors with any questions.