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GIScience Blog

Category: Research

  • The influence of the OSM mappers’ cultural backgrounds on their mapping behavior

    In order to analyze the quality of OSM data, a study at GIScience Heidelberg investigated the influence of the mappers’ cultural backgrounds on their mapping behavior and hence questioned the general validity of semantic (street) classifications in OSM. Nepal was hit by a series of earthquakes in April 2015. The OSM community quickly reacted by…

  • Empower Humanitarian Mapping with Deep Neural Networks to Detect Human Settlements

    Recently, earth observation by satellites has shown great capability in supporting a range of challenges such as disaster assessment, agriculture monitoring, and humanitarian mapping. MapSwipe, as a humanitarian mapping app, provides a crowdsourcing platform to collect volunteered geographical information (VGI), in order to generate the demanding base map of human settlements for better planning of…

  • GIScience/HeiGIT at Global Land Project open science meeting

    GIScience/HeiGIT member Sven Lautenbach is hosting together with Jonas Schwaab from the ETH Zürich a session on Multi-objective optimization approaches to support visioning and decision-making in land-use system science at the 4th Open Science Meeting of the Global Land Programme April 24-26, 2019 | Bern, Switzerland. The session aims at approaches that study the potential…

  • Successful 3DGeo group retreat

    The 3DGeo research group recently retreated to Lochau, Vorarlberg (AT). In intensive sessions throughout the three days, the members focused on future research, improving working within the group and external representation. A visit to Leica Geosystems in Heerbrugg (CH) complemented the experience, where they were able to visit the manufacturing line for Airborne Laser Scanning…

  • Hello world, openfuelservice!

    In addition to our already exciting and fascinating portfolio of open source software we now offer openfuelservice which is a new and very experimental advance in the world of fuel consumption and emission of cars. In the recent political and social discussion around these topics it became clear, that it is still hard for individual car…

  • New OpenRouteService QGIS Plugin

    Finally there is a new version of the QGIS plugin for OpenRouteService: ORS Tools. It gives easy access to our directions, isochrone and matrix API’s from within QGIS. The old plugin OSM Tools plugin has been deprecated due to its name being too generic. However, the name is not the only thing that changed: Create…

  • Plausible Parrots – HeiGIT’s OSHDB Supports Research in Citizen Science Data Quality

    In the GIScience research group at Heidelberg University, a recent PhD research project by Clemens Jacobs has been looking into the data quality of citizen science observations of organisms. This research aims at using geographic context as an information source for estimating the plausibility of an observation, e.g., of a bird, which was reported to…

  • Put the world’s most vulnerable people on the map with MapSwipe

    Humanitarian organizations can’t help people if they can’t find them. This was the simple reason to create MapSwipe back in 2016 and it is still as pressing as in the very beginning. In the last 2,5 years volunteers have contributed more than 18,000,000 results, which help humanitarian organizations to create maps of human settlements and…

  • Lukas Winiwarter wins Karl Kraus Award 2019

    Our team member Lukas Winiwarter was awarded the prestigious and competitive Karl-Kraus-Nachwuchsförderpreis 2019 for his outstanding research that he did in his diploma thesis. His research “Classification of 3D Point Clouds using Deep Neural Networks” was compiled at the TU Wien (and also at University of Stuttgart in a research visit) under the guidance of…

  • Publication of multi-sensor data from Arctic Siberian permafrost site

    A 16-year record (2002–2017) of permafrost, active-layer, and meteorological conditions at the Samoylov Island Arctic permafrost research site, Lena River delta, northern Siberia was just published in Earth System Science Data. The long-term observational data is complemented by high-resolution topographic data acquired by terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) in 2017, when the 3DGeo Research Group joined…

  • Mapping ecosystem services – the example of crop pollination

    Pollination by animals is an important service for wild plant communities as well as for agricultural crops. The service is mainly provided by insects, especially honeybees and a wide range of wild bees but also butterflies. A large number of crops depends globally on this pollination service – examples are apples, oranges, cocoa, coffee, strawberries…