a b s t r a c tThe outbreak of the 2019 novel coronavirus disease has caused more than 100,000 people to be infected and has caused thousands of deaths. Currently, the number of infections and deaths is still increasing rapidly. COVID-19 seriously threatens human health, production, life, social functioning and international relations, and has caused widespread concern around the globe. In the fight against COVID-19, geographic information systems (GIS) and big data technologies have played an important role in many aspects, including the rapid aggregation of multisource big data, rapid visualization of epidemic information, spatial tracking of COVID-19, prediction of regional transmission, identification of the spatial allocation of risk and selection of the control level, balance and management of the supply and demand of medical resources, social-emotional guidance and panic elimination, the provision of solid spatial information support for decision-making about COVID-19 prevention and control, measures formulation, and assessment of the effectiveness of COVID-19 prevention and control. GIS has developed and matured relatively quickly and has a complete technological route for data preparation, platform construction, model construction, and map production. However, for the struggle against COVID-19, the main challenge is finding strategies to adjust traditional technical methods and improve speed and accuracy to provide accurate information for rapid social management. Additionally, in the era of big data, data no longer come mainly from the government but are gathered from more diverse enterprises. As a result, the use of GIS faces difficulties in data acquisition and the integration of heterogeneous data, which requires governments, businesses, and academic institutions to jointly promote the formulation of relevant policies. At the technical level, spatial analysis methods for big data are in the ascendancy. Currently and for a long time in the future, the development of GIS should be strengthened to form a data-driven system for rapid knowledge acquisition, which signifies that GIS should be used to reinforce the social operation parameterization of models and methods, especially when providing support for social management.

Inadequate water quality can mean that water is unsuitable for a variety of human uses, thus exacerbating freshwater scarcity. Previous large-scale water scarcity assessments mostly focused on the availability of sufficient freshwater quantity for providing supplies, but neglected the quality constraints on water usability. Here we report a comprehensive nationwide water scarcity assessment in China, which explicitly includes quality requirements for human water uses. We highlight the necessity of incorporating water scarcity assessment at multiple temporal and geographic scales. Our results show that inadequate water quality exacerbates China's water scarcity, which is unevenly distributed across the country. North China often suffers water scarcity throughout the year, whereas South China, despite sufficient quantities, experiences seasonal water scarcity due to inadequate quality. Over half of the population are affected by water scarcity, pointing to an urgent need for improving freshwater quantity and quality management to cope with water scarcity.

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China’s inland water quality has been markedly improved since 2003 notwithstanding regional variability.

Understanding the spatiotemporal dynamics of urban population is crucial for addressing a wide range of urban planning and management issues. Aggregated geospatial big data have been widely used to quantitatively estimate population distribution at fine spatial scales over a given time period. However, it is still a challenge to estimate population density at a fine temporal resolution over a large geographical space, mainly due to the temporal asynchrony of population movement and the challenges to acquiring a complete individual movement record. In this article, we propose a method to estimate hourly population density by examining the time-series individual trajectories, which were reconstructed from call detail records using BP neural networks. We first used BP neural networks to predict the positions of mobile phone users at an hourly interval and then estimated the hourly population density using log-linear regression at the cell tower level. The estimated population density is linearly correlated with population census data at the sub-district level. Trajectory clustering results show five distinct diurnal dynamic patterns of population movement in the study area, revealing spatially explicit characteristics of the diurnal commuting flows, though the driving forces of the flows need further investigation.