Preface from Proceedings Editor

The 7th Annual University of Washington (UW) GIS Symposium was held on May 25, 2023. This year’s symposium was a return to an in-person event after three years of virtual symposiums due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 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 in Political Science, the Evans School of Public Policy, Professional and Continuing Education, Geography, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, and Earth and Space Sciences all delivered lightning talk presentations. Presentation topics were:

• quantifying the value of foreign place names in China’s housing market,
• assessing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Potential Location Assessment of Current and Estuarine Surveys (PLACES) method,
• reducing Customs and Border Protection's 100-mile enforcement zone in Washington State,
• comparing rail transit in Seattle and Singapore,
• identifying habitat fragmentation via roads in King County,
• monitoring changes to the shoreline of Mud Bay near Bellingham, Washington

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 keynote of this year’s symposium was delivered by Matthew Rogers of the UW Climate Impacts Group, who talked about the recently launched Climate Mapping for a Resilient Washington interactive mapping tool. In his talk, Rogers explained the climate related issues this web application addresses, outlined the process of creating the tool, and demonstrated the novel functions that set it apart from other similar tools.

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. Special thanks goes to the UW's Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE) for funding refreshments for the symposium.

Proceedings Editors

Kian Flynn and Matthew Parsons, UW Libraries