Indonesia: 2nd National Symposium on Geoinformation Science!

Z_GIS was invited to contribute to the 2nd ‘Simposium Nasional Sains Geinformasi 2011’ organised at the National University of Indonesia - Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta on 27/28 October 2011. Dr. Shahnawaz represented Z_GIS and delivered a keynote on ‘Global Geospatial Services Facilitating Local Solutions’ in which he presented the advent of GIScience from desktop based GIS confined to GIS laboratories to webGIS and now moving to cloudGIS

He highlighted that the nature of GIS is changing from a possession or property state to an open service which can make a range of contributions in emergency response and disaster management.

Geospatial Disaster Management

Prof. Josef Strobl (Chair of UNIGIS International and Director of Z_GIS) was invited to deliver the prestigious 'Professor S. P. Chatterjee Memorial Lecture' to the 31st Annual conference of the Indian National Cartographic Association (INCA). This highly anticipated lecture only is organised once every three years, as a tribute to the 'father of Indian Geography', who served as president of the IGU and received the highest scientific awards from his country.

Presenting this lecture, Prof. Strobl on Oct 15 in Chandigarh, India, spoke on "Map Interfaces for Disaster Management", discussing and demonstrating how GIScience and online geospatial techniques play very significant roles throughout the full disaster management cycle.

Alp-Water-Scarce Final Conference

From September 19-21, 2011 the final Alp-Water-Scarce Conference (funded in the Alpine Space Programme) took place in Graz. On behalf of the Z_GIS team Hermann Klug, Peter Zalavari and Barbara Hochwimmer presented the WebGIS based Atlas as an output created by the University of Salzburg. This Atlas includes the Alp-Water-Scarce pilot sites. These pilot sites include results from the Alp-Water-Scarce partners responsible for each site. Additionally, as an endeavor to make people understand climate change, Z_GIS implemented a tool enabling users to request temperature and precipitation data from climate station data in a defined period of interest.

Further Austrian partners contributed to the final Alp-Water-Scarce results. The Federal Institute for Agricultural Economics (AWI) reported on pan-alpine water scarcity impacts resulting from agricultural business while the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) was in charge of analyzing the impacts on water quality. The Federal Government of Styria was in charge of work package 5 "Water System Characterisation" while the Federal Government in Carinthia with its sub-contractors Joanneum Research, the Environmental Bureau Klagenfurt, and the Carinthian Lake Research institute was contributing to the Austrian/(Slovenian) pilot sites.

GS Soil Portal now provides access to datasets

In the framework of the eContentplus programme (now called ICT PSP) the GS Soil project opened the GS Soil Portal for retrieval of seamlessly available soil data across Europe. The first testing phase has been successfully finished. Presently we are looking for volunteers further testing of the portal functionalities. We are also inviting all data providers to join our efforts towards a comprehensive soil portal, making soil datasets seamlessly searchable across Europe. In case you are interested please do not hesitate to contact the project coordinator Katharina Feiden.

Interreg IVa project: Prognosis models from Digital Elevation Models

In the framework of an Interreg IVa project LIDAR datasets have been recorded in the Austrian-Bavarian border region (Salzburg, Tyrol, and Berchtesgaden). The pre-processed LIDAR data result in Digital Surface Models (DSM) and Digital Terrain Models (DTM) from which vegetation heights as normalized canopy height model (nCHM) have been extracted by using Object Based Image Analysis (OBIA) techniques.

The objective is to calculate vegetation based shadow areas for different time periods. This will be an input parameter for the evaluation of existing and planned alpine skiing slopes. In cooperation with the Centre for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG) a Snow Height Index (SHI) will be developed and spatially explicit represented for past, present and future snow heights at different years and times.

Duration: 04/2008 - 12/2011 (45 month)
Total Budget: 2 mio EUR