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.
This month the EGU President Alberto Montanari wrote an open letter to funding agencies with information on the assessment of presentations given at EGU scientific meetings. The letter emphasises that there is no distinction regarding the standing, quality or prestige of oral, poster, or PICO presentations at the EGU General Assembly and recommends that funding agencies do not use presentation type as a criterion for assessing the scientific value of contributions.
In other important news this month, the EGU has launched Weather and Climate Dynamics, a new open-access, two-stage journal with open review dedicated to the publication and public discussion of high-quality research on dynamical processes in the atmosphere. The journal is now open for submissions.
Next month brings two important EGU deadlines. The call for candidates for EGU Union President, General Secretary and Division Presidents is open until 15 September: we encourage EGU members to nominate themselves or propose a candidate. Before that, 5 September is the deadline to submit session proposals and short course ideas to the EGU General Assembly 2020. Contribute to the conference programme by submitting your proposals.