Guest editorial

When David Robinson approached me with the idea of putting together a special issue on GIS in Latin America, I thought it an excellent one. We hope that the ten papers that follow provide a sense of the enormous range of applications, both actual and potential, of GIS in the region without being too technical. The collection brings together studies from across the region -from Mexico to the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador- in addition to an overview of the status and use of GIS in the region. The papers highlight both methodological/technical and conceptual challenges of incorporating spatial science in various applications; they also highlight the usefulness of GIS in helping to visualize and answer questions that otherwise could not be addressed.

The first contribution to this collection is from Buzai and Robinson and provides an overview of the status and use of GIS in Latin America. The authors mark the year 1987 as that when GIS technologies really began to be incorporated widely in both public and private sector, and track the history of GIS in Latin America through the successes and difficulties of technology transfer to the use of GIS for a wide number of different applications. In conclusion, they stress the importance of using GIS to foster 'geography as a science' in Latin America.

In the second contribution, WinklerPrins and Aldrich describe an interactive GIS for mapping locations of Amazonian Dark Earths (ADE) across the Amazon Basin. The authors describe how they deal with issues of data specificity and accuracy, the challenges of mapping sites based on description rather than coordinates, and strategies for representing the sites and assigning confidence levels. The authors acknowledge that the GIS is a work in progress, but one that already provides a valuable visualization tool for both research and education.

The third contribution by Wernke takes us to the Colca Valley in the highlands of Peru to examine local historical agricultural deintensification. This work combines historical analysis and interpretation of locations of field sites, colonial resettlement and deintensification, the Little Ice Age climate, and community organization with spatial and multivariate analyses. A modified least-cost path analysis in GIS enabled the author to elucidate how residents of different ayllus in the village of Coporaque made decisions.

Frank and Berry's contribution is another historical GIS analysis that examines the characteristics of slavery in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1869 through mapping records of slave sales and locations of buyers and sellers, and linking the spatial information with that of characteristics of neighborhoods. The authors are able to map addresses through the use of an historical street networks database, visualize slave movements as they were bought and sold, and connect these trade events with rich data on the wider experience of the slaves.

The fifth contribution by Sletto and colleagues brings us to the present with a critical assessment of the mapped outcomes and experiences of a participatory GIS project in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The authors describe issues that arose in creating the maps, and the implications of the maps they were creating, and assert that the mapped aspects of the local community constitute "hybrid representations of space, place and landscape" resulting from co-production of knowledge.

Walsh and colleagues examine urban development and human-environment interactions, with particular focus on human and environmental health and supporting infrastructures for Puerto Villasmil in the Galapagos. They used a mixed-methods approach with remotely-sensed time-series data, GIS mapping, water quality statistics, interviews and focus groups, and spatio-temporal GIS analyses to assess the impacts of the increasing human population on the island.

The seventh contribution, from Kelly and colleagues, addresses indigenous land tenure outcomes in the Huasteca Potosina region of Mexico in the light of new land tenure reforms. The authors were able to link within a GIS environment, census and cadastral data based on different spatial units, highlighting differences in responses between nucleos agrarios.

Powell and Roberts describe a methodology using multi-temporal remotely sensed data to examine urban extent, population and land-cover trajectories within urban areas through an analysis of data from ten urban centers in...