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
This month the EGU has opened a call for financial support for training schools in the Earth, planetary or space sciences scheduled for 2019. We also welcome proposals for conferences on solar system and planetary processes, as well as on biochemical processes in the Earth system, in line with two new conference series we are launching that are named after two female scientists.
Also this month, we have opened the EGU 2019 General Assembly call for sessions, with 6 September as a deadline for scientific sessions, short courses and townhall meetings. The deadline to submit proposals for Union Symposia and Great Debates is 15 August. Last but not the least, we are pleased to announced we have raised 17,000 EUR for a carbon offsetting scheme, thanks to 2018 General Assembly participants.