The International Cartographic Conference 2021 – Firenze, Italy: a truly wonderful occasion to celebrate the outcomes and advances of international collaboration and the resilience of Italian Cartographers

The international Cartography and GIScience community were gratified to receive news that the 2021 International Cartographic Conference would take place in Firenze, Italy between 14 and 18 December, in spite of the many hurdles that had to be overcome by the Associazione Italiana di Cartografia to ensure that this important event took place in this time of global disruption and uncertainty due to COVID-19. Our Italian colleagues are to be congratulated on their dedicated and diligent endeavours to ensure that the International Cartographic Association’s community will be able to meet and advance the theory and praxis of Cartography and GIScience. The Journal editors worked closely with the Conference Publications Chair, Professor Paola Zamperlin of the Università di Pisa to progress papers for review and potential publishing. Selected papers submitted for the ‘Advances in Cartography’ publishing route for ICC2021 were considered for publication in the Special Issues of the Journal. Ninety-nine full papers were submitted to the ‘Advances’ publishing route. These papers were reviewed initially by the conference LOC, and evaluated by both national and international reviewers. After these reviews were complete and the outcomes considered by the LOC, selected papers were recommended to us for consideration for further review, with the potential of publishing in the Journal. Twenty-four selected papers were recommended by the LOC to the IJC editors. From these papers, sixteen papers were identified for consideration and a further two blind reviews were conducted on these papers. The papers published in Issue 7.3, 2021 and Issue 8.1, 2022 were realised by this process. We thank all LOC reviewers and Journal reviewers for their support of the review process, the Journal and, more broadly, the researchers whose work that advances the research goals of the International Cartographic Association are reported upon in these Special Issues of the Journal. The papers herein begin with a contribution by Radek Barvir and Vit Vozenilek, with their contribution entitled Graphic map load measuring tool – development and verification. They explain that ‘Map load’ is a map property quantifying the amount of map content in cartographic products. This paper presents information about an easy-to-use and freely available tool GMLMT (Graphic Map Load Measuring Tool) that applies a metric averaging of the amount of visible structures in a map using an edge-detection approach to measure graphic map load of raster representations of maps. The process of designing the tool is described and the outcomes of their experiments are reported. This is followed by the paper Spatial thinking in cartography teaching for schoolchildren by Sônia Maria Vanzella Castellar and Barbara Gomes Flaire Jordão. The paper provides the results of a study that investigated school teaching practises that relate spatial thinking with the learning of maps from a cartographic education perspective. The study was undertaken to