Advancing intelligent geography: Current status, innovations, and future prospects

• This study traces geography’s evolution and introduces Intelligent Geography. • It compares Intelligent Geography and GeoAI to clarify key differences. • It explores big data, AI, HPC, and core tools like digital twins and deep learning. • Findings show great promise but raise concerns on security and model clarity. • Ethical AI and integration frameworks are vital to address these challenges. Geography is shifting from static description to a feedback-driven, adaptive discipline integrating sensing, prediction, comparison, and continuous self-improvement. This transformation underlies Intelligent Geography (IG), where artificial intelligence (AI), big data analytics, and high-performance computing (HPC) converge to enhance spatial understanding and guide intelligent decisions in complex systems. The discipline’s historical stages—descriptive, experimental, theoretical, quantitative, GIScience, and information geography—form the foundation for an overarching adaptive framework. In this framework, diverse geospatial data streams seamlessly feed real-time models whose predicted outputs are compared with observed conditions to iteratively refine predictions. A hallmark of IG is embedding domain theory into AI workflows, producing predictive models that self-adjust to new data or control system behavior. Applications such as smart traffic management, climate-responsive urban planning, and disaster-resilient digital twins illustrate the sensing–prediction–adaptation/learning cycle in practice for complex changing systems. We examine the enabling roles of HPC, deep learning, and geographic large models in implementing feedback loops, and address persistent challenges in data integration, interpretability, and governance. We conclude with a vision of IG as an evolving socio-technical ecosystem that through adaptation and self-learning turns spatial data into adaptive, actionable knowledge that assists in intelligent decision-making, whether it is for AI systems or human ones.