The enviroSPACE laboratory is dedicated to spatial analyses within the Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of Geneva, as part of the Forel Institute, and in close collaboration with the Climatic Change and Climate Impacts group, the Ecology group, as well as the InfoGEO at the Geography department. These groups collaborate at the University of Geneva to promote GIS through a common web platform. We also work under a unique and long lasting agreement with UNEP/GRID-Geneva and the Federal Office for the Envionment.
We have coordinated the FP7 enviroGRIDS project in the Black Sea catchment, and are presently coordinating the FP7 EOPOWER project. We are also participating to the IASON, ACQWA, PEGASO, AfroMaison and EcoArm2ERA FP7 projects. We are also coordinating the SNSF SCOPES ARPEGEO project, and the CRUS/SCIEX enviroPAD project.
- 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.We are building several Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) to improve data sharing and processing.
- 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 in Ecology, Hydrology, Demography, Climate, Risks or Land Cover analyses.
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).