European Geosciences Union
Division on Earth and Space Science Informatics
President: Helen M. Glaves (essi@egu.eu)
Deputy President: Jens Klump
(jens.klump@csiro.au)
As far as informatics and information technology are concerned, the ESSI division deals with Community-driven and multidisciplinary challenges and solutions. This include topics like: data model and metadata standardization, spatial data infrastructure interoperability, semantics services, quality and uncertainty information encoding and propagation, geospatial data processing, environmental model accessability, big data management, and data visualization for scientific discovery.
The 2018 Ian McHarg Medal is awarded to Kerstin A. Lehnert for exceptional contributions to the advancement of informatics and, in particular, her pioneering efforts on open, transparent and reproducible science.
A new statement on good practice in the evaluation of researchers and research programmes has been posted by three national academies (Académie des Sciences, Leopoldina and Royal Society). It states that “the use of bibliometric indicators for early career scientists must in particular be avoided. Such use will tend to push scientists who are building their career into wellestablished/fashionable research fields, rather than encouraging them to tackle new scientific challenges.” (p. 4). Read the full statement at: https://royalsociety.org/~/media/policy/Publications/2017/08-12-2017-royal-society-leopoldina-and-academie-des-sciences-call-for-more-support-for-research-evaluators.pdf
The deadline to nominate brilliant scientists for the EGU 2019 awards and medals is this month, on the 15th. To increase diversity in the group of EGU awardees and medallists, we encourage the EGU membership to consider gender, geographical and cultural balance when nominating outstanding Earth, planetary and space scientists at various career stages. Other important dates to keep in mind are 3 June, the deadline for submitting your feedback on the EGU 2018 General Assembly, and 18 June, the deadline for presenting authors at the meeting to submit their presentations to our online repository. Also of highlight is the call for proposals for training schools and conference series, opening on Friday (check egu.eu then). We will be launching two new EGU conference series, named in honour of two female scientists.