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.
On April 12th 2018, the first Research Software Engineers (RSEs) for geosciences meeting was held at the European Geophysical Union (EGU) General Assembly (GA) in Vienna, Austria. The EGU GA is a huge event with over 15.000 people from more than 100 countries. It has a diverse programme with thousands of posters and hundreds of sessions, but what it lacked was an event to bring together scientists who contribute to research software. Daniel Nüst from the Institute for Geoinformatics, Germany, …
The meeting programme for the EGU General Assembly 2019 (7–12 April, Vienna) was published this month. With more than 1000 scientific sessions, debates, short courses and side events, and close to 17,000 abstracts, it promises to be a varied and exciting meeting. If you have not yet registered, please do so by the end of today to get reduced registration rates.
This month the EGU has also issued a response to potential changes to the European Research Council, one of the world’s leading and most respected funders of frontier research, designed and governed by scientists. "Without this close relationship with the research community, the ERC’s ability to support the very best frontier science will be compromised," the statement reads.
The EGU has also announced a new award for Earth, planetary and space science journalism this month. The Angela Croome Award is the newest edition to the EGU awards and medals portfolio, joining the newly renamed Julia and Johannes Weertman Medal, the recently launched Katia and Maurice Krafft Award for geoscience outreach and engagement, and many other prestigious honours.
Last but not the least, we are sad to report that Lily Pereg, Deputy President and Programme Group Chair of the EGU Soil System Sciences (SSS) Division and Executive Editor of the SOIL journal, passed away in January. Read the obituary on the EGU website.