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 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 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.
Earlier this month, we hosted a record-breaking number of participants (over 16,000) at our annual EGU General Assembly in Vienna. The meeting included over 16,000 poster, oral and PICO presentations in over 650 sessions, as well as a number of popular short courses and side events. We are grateful to all participants, including conveners, the EGU Programme Committee, Copernicus Meetings, conference assistants, exhibitors, and ACV and EGU office staff, for making the meeting a success. If you participated in the meeting, we especially welcome your suggestions and feedback (deadline: 9 June), which will be instrumental in ensuring an even more successful General Assembly next year (3–8 May 2020, Vienna).
Of special highlight at the meeting was a session on ‘Science, Politics and European (dis)integration: A Conversation of Geoscientists with Ilaria Capua and Mario Monti’, which motivated the EGU to issue a declaration supporting a united Europe for the benefit of global scientific research.
In other news this month, the EGU launched a new journal, Geochronology, as well as a science-policy competition for early career scientists (deadline: 15 May). We also ran an extraordinary election, which saw Claudio Zaccone elected as SSS Division President.
Finally, we would like to remind you that we are currently accepting nominations for the 2020 EGU awards and medals, including for the new Angela Croome Award and Katia and Maurice Krafft Award. To promote the best deserving geoscientists from around the world and 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. Please consider submitting a nomination by 15 June.