The International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH) is the premier long-running forum in geographical information science, providing a prestigious outlet to geographers, cartographers, computer scientists and others in this rapidly developing multidisciplinary area. This conference has been organized as one of the main activities of the International Geographical Union since it was first started in Zurich in 1984. This selection of papers from the 16th SDH conference, jointly organized in Toronto, Canada with the 2014 ISPRS Technical Commission II Midterm Symposium as the Joint International Conference on Geospatial Theory, Processing, Modeling and Applications, offers readers exemplary contributions to geospatial scholarship and practice from the 30th year anniversary of the conference.