The UCGIS education committee is proud to present this year’s Innovation in GIScience Education Award to YouthMappers, marking the first time this award has been given to a specific organization or effort. And YouthMappers is a very deserving inaugural awardee. YouthMappers is a global network of student-led, campus-based, faculty-mentored chapters that engage university students in mapping activities to address local and global challenges. YouthMappers collaborates with NGOs, governmentagencies, and others to amplify impact via use of open data. Operating as a decentralized yet interconnected network, YouthMappers leverages the collective power of students across continents to create meaningful and impactful solutions. YouthMappers’ mapping activities have touched the lives and places where 52 million people live. This includes charting more than 20 million buildings, 700 thousand kilometers of roads, and tagging 120 thousand land parcels and built features with attribute details. Real-world uses of the data created include the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, informing humanitarian responders about which buildings were damaged; identifying unelectrified villages in Sierra Leone from motorcycle-mounted street view images, using GeoAI to detect utility poles to show where to prioritize renewable solar mini-grid infrastructure.

YouthMappers promotes shared opportunities by directly engaging future talent for the global geospatial sector with real-world applications, purposeful training in open data technologies and leadership experience with humanitarian, environmental, and sustainable development in their home countries. Connecting with a vast peer network, YouthMappers creates links to relevant universities for education pathways, and to industry for career opportunities. YouthMappers fosters a new generation of professionals who are adept at applying these skills for climate adaptation. The program’s focus on real-world challenges, including climate adaptation, positions YouthMappers as valuable assets in public, private, and nonprofit sectors alike requiring geospatial expertise. Armed with technical proficiency, YouthMappers alumni have gone on to establish startups or consultancies, creating opportunities for themselves and others to fill the gap for climate adaptation, response, and other needs.

For these reasons and more, we are proud to name YouthMappers as the recipient of this year’s Innovation in GIScience Education Award.