Preface from Proceedings Editor

The 9th Annual University of Washington (UW) GIS Symposium was held on May 20, 2025. This year’s symposium was an in-person event. The symposium was held in the UW Libraries’ Research Commons and continued its mission of creating an opportunity for faculty, students, and staff across disciplines to come together and share their GIS-related research.

Featured at this year’s symposium was an interdisciplinary representation of work from across the UW campus. Students and staff from the following programs and units all delivered lightning talk presentations: UW Facilities, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Urban Planning, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, History, and Geography. Presentation topics were:

• cherry blossom monitoring on the UW Seattle campus,
• identifying priority locations of charging stations for electric three wheeler vehicles in West Bengal, India,
• the need to keep bus lines open for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic games,
• using remote sensing phenology monitoring methodologies in extreme environments to monitor Eschscholzia californica in the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve,
• using digital-spatial methods to explore the ecological ramifications of Japan’s development of the industrial pulp and paper industries in northeastern China during the Manuchukuo period,
• mapping the effect of urban and educational environments on queer joy experiences of UW students.

All of the lightning talk presenters attended the symposium and were on hand to answer attendee questions via a Q&A session following the lightning talk portion of the event. Abstracts from the lightning talks are included in these Proceedings below.

The opening presentation of this year’s symposium was delivered by Matthew Parsons, Geospatial Data and Maps Librarian for the UW Libraries, who talked about the UW’s recent membership in the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) and the benefits of participating in the BTAA Geospatial Information Network (GIN), followed by a demonstration of the BTAA-GIN’s Geoportal (https://geo.btaa.org/).

This year’s symposium was open to all members of the UW community and the public. We would like to thank everyone who contributed to the success of this year’s UW GIS Symposium including members of the GIS Symposium planning committee for their numerous contributions and the staff of the Research Commons.

Proceedings Editors

Kian Flynn and Matthew Parsons, UW Libraries