European Geosciences Union
Division on Earth and Space Science Informatics
President: Helen M. Glaves (essi@egu.eu)
Deputy President: Jane K. Hart
(jhart@soton.ac.uk)
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 2020 Ian McHarg Medal is awarded to Paul Wessel for outstanding contributions to developing open-source software, including Generic Mapping Tools (GMT), for the Earth and space sciences that have enabled thousands of research projects and papers.
The 2019 Ian McHarg Medal is awarded to Stefano Nativi for outstanding contributions to international Earth science informatics through enabling interoperability of disparate data types, thus laying the foundations for global interdisciplinary science.
The 2019 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Stephen Camilleri Investigating the relationship between earthquakes and online news
This month EGU issued an important statement condemning racism—and all other forms of discrimination—anywhere in the world and re-asserting our commitment to improving equality of opportunity, diversity and inclusion both within and beyond the geosciences.
A crucial component of anti-racism is sustaining a productive conversation about issues related to equality, diversity and inclusion. In keeping with EGU’s bottom-up structure and philosophy, we welcome diverse voices and opinions and encourage all geoscientists to constructively express their thoughts. In response to recent events, numerous individuals and groups have done so, including:
In celebration of Pride Month, EGU also published an article about risks to safety and other issues that LGBTQIA+ geoscientists face while conducting fieldwork in certain countries.
Since EGU’s founding, the organisation has worked to ensure equitable treatment for everyone in our community. Through our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion working group, we are working towards our stated goals to increase diversity at EGU events and on EGU committees and boards, and we pledge to continue to foster diversity to advance fundamental and applied geoscience research—to the benefit of the Earth and all humanity.