In other words, geoethics is the concept/process involving human beings understanding their environment(s) and implementing sustainable infrastructure and practices that ensure we are maintaining and protecting our natural environments. Thus:

What geoethical implications/issues does our selected article possess?

For the purpose of this project, we will sort the article's geoethical implications and issues into two categories:

• Implications/Issues with regard to the environment.

• Implications/Issues with regard to the article itself (availability of data, methods described, etc.).

Implication/Issues with regard to the natural environment:

Overall, there does not appear to be any obvious harmful implications with the article's findings and the environment. Actually, what the article is attempting to do with its data, methods, and findings may help protect and maintain natural environments within its study area and the country of Finland overall. Letting home-buyers have access to a geospatial tool that aids them in finding homes within clean, sustainable, and convenient environments helps persuade land/neighborhood owners to do just that.

Certain variables, such as "Nature", "PM10 concentration (air quality)", and "Noise level from road traffic: day and night", directly measure how "good" or "bad" the surrounding environment for a home is. Given what this tool measures and concludes, it would benefit land/neighborhood owners to improve their natural environments to warrant higher scores and thus more paying customers.

In conclusion, this article's findings can benefit the natural environment.

Implication/Issues with regard to the article's methods:

Sadly, the article's data, analysis, and methods do not meet certain criteria to be considered geoethical (in this team's opinion). The article contains very little details describing where they got the data and no details describing how they analyzed it. This has made recreating the paper's methods and findings extremely difficult.

Although a table of their variables is included (along with which data was used for each variable and why it was considered for the analysis), finding the exact data used proved to be difficult in the best case and nearly impossible in the worst case. Furthermore, the data for the city in the case study (Kuopio) could not be found by our team. Whether it was unavailable or locked behind a paywall/language barrier, we could not find and prepare it. We instead found data for the city of Helsinki.

When reading their method section, it begins with "GIS tools are applied..." and no other information. This left the team with only our inherent knowledge of GIS tools through previous courses and this course. As our project neared completion, we still have a very loose understanding of how they theoretically analyzed their data. We were unable to exactly replicate their findings in practice.

These aforementioned problems resulted in our inability to effectively reproduce the article's analysis. Considering the authors' claim that it can be reproducible for other geographic areas (especially in Finland), this greatly harms their method's credibility.

In conclusion, the lack of detailed information about the article's data and analysis put into question its overall credibility. It is not an example of good geoethical practices when writing scientific/academic papers for GIS.