GIScience / Geoinformatics Research Group

From 13 to 17 September 2021, the “International Transdisciplinarity Conference ITD21” took place in online format. The TdLab Geography participated with the contribution “Towards a co-design of adaptation measures to heat events in cities: examples from Heidelberg, Germany”. In a self-produced video, Nicole Aeschbach and Kathrin Foshag presented two studies on climate change adaptation from [...]

Urban green spaces (UGSs) can provide important ecosystem services for citizens and their well-being. To make use of these services according to UGS user demands, urban residents, tourists, and city administrations should know where UGSs are located, what qualities they have and how to reach them on convenient routes. A new open access paper at [...]

MapSwipe has ben announced as ‘App of the Day‘ in the Apple AppStore! (27.08.2021) Thank you to all our volunteers for the continued help and support which keeps the app going. Read the blogpost here: https://apps.apple.com/ca/story/id1559236909 The team at the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) and the GIScience Research Group at Heidelberg University has shaped MapSwipe’s development from [...]

Hello and welcome back to the ohsome Region of the Month-blog post series where you can read about potential use cases of the ohsome API and maybe even get inspired to send some requests of your own. If you are new to the series you should definitely take a look at former blog posts, for example our last [...]

In the SYSSIFOSS project, we are investigating how we can take advantage of virtual laser scanning (VLS), the simulation of laser scanning in a computer environment, in forestry applications. These applications include survey planning and optimization, sensitivity analyses, and algorithm development. For example, VLS may be used to investigate the influence of different sensor and [...]

Within the AHK-4D project, we continually monitor topographic change at the alpine rock glacier Äußeres Hochebenkar in Austria. Based on multitemporal and multi-source 3D point clouds at up to two-week acquisition intervals, we are developing methods to quantify the magnitudes and frequencies of individual processes of topographic change over varying timescales. This year, we have also [...]

We are happy to announce a revamped openrouteservice maps client for disaster management. It was built based on the new openrouteservice maps client, that is an open source route planner with plenty of features. Specific disaster features were incorporated via the development of developing plugins. It was developed and is maintained by the Heidelberg Institute for [...]

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a global mapping project which generates free geographical information through a community of volunteers. OSM is used in a variety of applications and for research purposes. However, it is also possible to import external data sets to OpenStreetMap. The opinions about these data imports are divergent among researchers and contributors, and the [...]

A recently published article in ‘Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability‘ investigates the role of digital technologies and data innovations, such as big data and citizen-generated data, to enable transformations to sustainability. We reviewed recent literature in this area and identified that the most prevailing assumption of work is related to the capacity of data to [...]

Our forest laser scanning dataset collected in the frame of the SYSSIFOSS project is now openly available through the PANGAEA Data Publisher: Weiser, H., Schäfer, J., Winiwarter, L., et al. (2021): Terrestrial, UAV-borne and airborne laser scanning point clouds of central European forest plots, Germany, with extracted individual trees and manual forest inventory measurements. PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.933426 Until [...]