Investigating the causes of the spatial heterogeneity of glacial changes offers vital information about glacial behavior and provides forecasting ability to define where glacier retreat may occur in the future. This study was designed to determine the spatial distribution of Ağrı Mountain glacier vulnerability. The main goal of the current study was to assess the forecasting capabilities of Geographical Information System (GIS)-based Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) for determining the location of the mountain glacier retreat. To estimate the glacier retreat, the following criteria were selected: elevation, aspect, slope, direction, and glacier surface temperature anomaly (GSTA). The entropy method was used for weighting the criteria for the evaluation of the vulnerable areas of the glacier. The results of this method clearly indicate a strong relationship between GSTA, direction, and elevation criteria and glacier retreat. The glacier vulnerability map was created by synthesizing criteria layers with their weights. The vulnerability map provided a consistency of 77.8% in the short term and 92.1% in the long term. In the study, the priority melting zones were determined and glacial retreat locations were forecasted in 10-year periods.

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is a public health emergency of international concern that caused disaster consequences all over the world. To mitigate and manage the pandemic, geographical information systems (GIS)-based spatial analysis has been used in a key role. To this aim, many GIS-based maps are produced by many national and international institutions. However, the produced maps are prepared by conventional methods and the features in these maps representing by their areal size. This paper proposes the diffusion-based cartograms for visualization of the COVID-19 outbreak. In the study, daily country-level data of the first 150 days of the COVID-19 outbreak were obtained from WHO, and the spread and spatial patterns of the epidemic were presented according to the number of confirmed cases and deaths. As a result of the study, it was observed that the cartogram is a powerful visualization tool and superior to the classical methods.