Spatial Predictions and Analyses in Complex Environments

Welcome to the enviroSPACE laboratory that is dedicated to spatial analyses within the Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of Geneva, as part of the new Forel Institute, and in close collaboration with the Climatic Change and Climate Impacts group, as well as UNEP/GRID and the InfoGEO laboratory at the Geography department.

We are building together a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) and we are collaborating in various projects.

We are presently coordinating the FP7 enviroGRIDS project in the Black Sea catchment, and participating to the ACQWA, PEGASO, AfroMaison and EcoArm2ERA FP7 projects. We are also coordinating the SNSF SCOPES ARPEGEO project and are contributing actively to the GIS work of the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD). 

Our aim is to promote interdisciplinary research based on spatially explicit information and indicators on the past, present and future state of changing and complex environment.

Our challenge is clearly to fill the gap between scientific information on one hand and decision making on the other hand, in order to improve the sustainable management of our unique and fragile environment.

Our toolbox is composed of traditional GIS, remote sensing, relational data bases and statistical analyses, as well as dedicated modeling tools for:

• species distribution
• hydrology
• land cover change
• demography
• regional climate
• natural risks... 

These geoprocessing tools are producing spatially explicit outputs at various scales. Methods for downscaling and upscaling geographic information are used to integrate them in order to asses for instance the vulnerability, sustainability or  services of ecosystems.

These geoprocessing tools are also requesting more and more computing power to manage complex workflows on large datasets. We are therefore exploring ways to run these geoprocesses on the Internet and on distributed computing solutions (clusters, grids and clouds). 

Our expertise is being taught at the University of Geneva by our active contributions to the cursus of the Master of Environmental Sciences and the Certificate of Geomatics.