Category: Research
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Transdisciplinary study on climate change adaptation featured in Heidelberg University Newsroom
No place for climate change: A recent transdisciplinary study on the viability of public spaces in cities under increasing heat was featured in the official Heidelberg University Newsroom (English version here). The study has been conducted by a Heidelberg research team led by Dr. Kathrin Foshag and investigated the heat stress in selected urban squares…
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Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team has been selected by the Audacious Project
The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has announced major financial support from the Audacious Project, which will be provided over the next five years. HOT aims to use this funding to grow OpenStreetMap (OSM) communities in 94 countries. By engaging one million volunteers the goal is to map an area home to one billion people living…
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Exploring OSM for healthcare access analysis in Sub-Saharan Africa
[tl;dr] Using hospital locations and the ORS Isochrone service, we have created a method for comparing physical access to healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa. Hospital locations were derived from OpenStreetMap and compared against another free available dataset. Results indicate strong similarity in both hospital datasets, however the uncertainty of our method requires further evaluation. Figure 1…
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Going green with MeinGrün – Today App launch in Heidelberg and Dresden
Today the time has come: The “meinGrün” web app for Dresden and Heidelberg is officially launched. With the mobile application you can (re-)discover known and unknown green spaces and find a pleasant route to those. Users can learn about the functions of the app via virtual scavenger hunt. The app is the result of the…
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No place for climate change
Transdisciplinary study on climate change adaptation of urban squares Climate change is not only taking place on distant continents or far into the future, but here and now. In Germany, too, the temperature is rising – and even faster than the global average – and the number of hot days is increasing. Especially in cities,…
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Advanced time-dependent routing soon available in Openrouteservice
We are thrilled to give you a sneak peak into routing with time-dependent road restrictions, the outcome of our collaboration with GraphHopper GmbH in the research project TARDUR supported by the mFUND initiative of the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI) Germany. Our primary focus was on the most common time-dependent restrictions in OSM, namely access…
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Farmland abandonment in Rio de Janeiro state
Land use change in Brazil is often associated with a loss of natural habitat (Amazon, Cerrado, Pantanal,…) driven by farmland expansion. A current analysis by a team of Brazilian and German researchers (involving HeiGIT member Sven Lautenbach) shows that for Rio de Janeiro state farmland abandonment has been an important process. Approximately 1 million hectares…
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Video on research of 3DGeo on change analysis methods at an active rock glacier
Always been curious about how we develop our methods for 3D/4D change analysis? Then check out our new video on high-resolution and high-frequency monitoring of a rock glacier in Austria! Link to video LiDAR datasets of the rock glacier provide the basis for the development of 3D and 4D methods for geomorphic change quantification within…
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Student field trip to Northern England
From 2nd – 9th March 2020, students of our department took part in an excursion to Northern England. Among the areas visited under the lead of Dr. Jack Williams were the Peak and Lake Districts, the North York Moors National Parks and Durham County. Preliminary seminars provided the students with background knowledge on the topics…
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Analysing OSM Completeness of health facilities in Sub-Sahara Africa in ohsomeHeX
A new map in ohsomeHeX provides an overview of areas in Sub-Sahara Africa where information on health facilities is still missing in OpenStreetMap (OSM). The completeness of OSM is measured by comparing to a reference dataset on public health facilities in Sub-Sahara Africa, which was developed by Maina et al. 2019. Especially in these days,…
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Tales from a Special Spring at Geography Heidelberg
Best wishes and as happy Easter holidays as possible from GIScience Heidelberg! Our university campus is almost empty in its physical presence, our research is “virtually” contributing and still “flying”. Nature keeps on reminding us of its fantastic beauty but also distinctness. Spring is arriving at our department on campus (Prof. Hettner monument): Context transforms…