Figure 1: This graph breaks down by state the number of magazine subscribers who are primarily employed or engaged in education.

Our four-part series on mapping the geospatial community ends with an exploration of the traits that attract spatial firms to certain locations. The first two columns in our "Mapping the Geospatial Community" series (Thrall and Campins 2004a, 2004b) dealt with the user side of the spatial industry. In those articles, we applied business geographic technology and reasoning to evaluate the readership of Geospatial Solutions. In part three, we described the location pattern of geospatial firms at the state level within the United States and across the globe. In this final installment, we move toward an explanation of location behavior for geospatial firms, asking what geographic characteristics appeal to, foster, and grow spatial businesses?

As in the first and second installments in this series, we performed our analysis using Geospatial Solutions' database of audited subscribers. In this case, we jointly analyzed that database in conjunction with Geospatial Solutions' database of company headquarters, which we assessed separately in the third installment (Thrall and Campins 2004c).

Table 1: Geospatial Solutions Education Readership in the Lower 48 States

Using Coder/plus, a previous version of ESRI's Community Coder, we geocoded the company headquarters and subscriber databases. The software successfully geocoded 645 company headquarters and 26,024 subscriber addresses, and we imported the resulting data files into ArcGIS 8 as point-data layers.

Readership and Education The availability of high-quality, affordable labor is a necessary ingredient for a successful business location (see Thrall 2002, chapter 6). During the post-World War II era, the availability of inexpensive production labor was what determined the location of many U.S. firms. In the post-Vietnam War era, however — particularly for the emerging high-technology industry — the transition was underway for firms to seek out markets for affordable white-collar labor. Those states with an education industry that could accommodate the needed supply of high-technology labor attracted the greatest percentage of technology firms.

Figure 2: Based on the percentage of this magazines education subscribers within the lower 48 states, California, Texas, and New York have the most capacity to educate geospatial personnel.

Analyzing the Geospatial Solutions' databases with this knowledge reveals that 2,614 readers (one-tenth of subscribers) are employed or engaged in education. A reasonable first approximation of a location's capacity to create new skilled labor in geospatial technologies is to count education subscribers by state. Figure 1 depicts the number of Geospatial Solutions' subscribers by state who are primarily employed or engaged in education. Not shown in the chart are 12 education subscribers in Hawaii, 6 in Alaska, and 28 in Puerto Rico.

Table 1 provides the exact count of the education subscribers by state, revealing that California, Texas, and New York lead the nation in this category. Figure 2 collaborates this further, showing the percentage of all education subscribers by state within the lower 48 states. The findings give rise to a reasonable hypothesis that the educational infrastructure of California, Texas, and New York lead the nation in the capacity to educate geospatial personnel.