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Graciela Metternicht is a Belgian researcher on environmental geography (geospatial technologies and their application in environmental management and policy).
Metternicht is originally from Belgium. She has a Bachelor of Science and a PhD in Physical Geography from University of Ghent (Belgium). [1]
Currently Metternicht is the Dean of Science at Western Sydney University and Adjunct Professor of Environmental Geography @Earth and Sustainability Science Research Centre, UNSW Sydney.
She was previously a Professor of Environmental Geography in the Environmental Management Programme of the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales. [2]
She was Regional Coordinator of Early Warning and Assessment of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Previous academic appointments include Head of Discipline and Professor of Geospatial Systems and Environmental Management at the School of Natural and Built Environments of the University of South Australia and Professor of Spatial Sciences at the Western Australian School of Mines, Curtin University of Technology. [3]
Metternicht has served on the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification's Science-Policy Interface. [4] She was appointed to the Australia Government's Threatened Species Scientific Committee in December 2023. [5]
Metternicht has produced international outstanding research on the use of spatial information for land degradation and agriculture-related applications. [6] [7] [8] She has received grants from the Australian Research Council and the Australia and New Zealand Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information. [9] She was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the International Cartographic Association. [10]
A geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and software that store, manage, analyze, edit, output, and visualize geographic data. Much of this often happens within a spatial database; however, this is not essential to meet the definition of a GIS. In a broader sense, one may consider such a system also to include human users and support staff, procedures and workflows, the body of knowledge of relevant concepts and methods, and institutional organizations.
Remote sensing is the acquisition of information about an object or phenomenon without making physical contact with the object, in contrast to in situ or on-site observation. The term is applied especially to acquiring information about Earth and other planets. Remote sensing is used in numerous fields, including geophysics, geography, land surveying and most Earth science disciplines. It also has military, intelligence, commercial, economic, planning, and humanitarian applications, among others.
Geomatics is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as the "discipline concerned with the collection, distribution, storage, analysis, processing, presentation of geographic data or geographic information". Under another definition, it consists of products, services and tools involved in the collection, integration and management of geographic (geospatial) data. Surveying engineering was the widely used name for geomatic(s) engineering in the past. Geomatics was placed by the UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems under the branch of technical geography.
Geoinformatics is a scientific field primarily within the domains of Computer Science and technical geography. It focuses on the programming of applications, spatial data structures, and the analysis of objects and space-time phenomena related to the surface and underneath of Earth and other celestial bodies. The field develops software and web services to model and analyse spatial data, serving the needs of geosciences and related scientific and engineering disciplines. The term is often used interchangeably with Geomatics, although the two have distinct focuses; Geomatics emphasizes acquiring spatial knowledge and leveraging information systems, not their development. At least one publication has claimed the discipline is pure computer science outside the realm of geography.
A GIS software program is a computer program to support the use of a geographic information system, providing the ability to create, store, manage, query, analyze, and visualize geographic data, that is, data representing phenomena for which location is important. The GIS software industry encompasses a broad range of commercial and open-source products that provide some or all of these capabilities within various information technology architectures.
Geographic information science or geoinformation science is a scientific discipline at the crossroads of computational science, social science, and natural science that studies geographic information, including how it represents phenomena in the real world, how it represents the way humans understand the world, and how it can be captured, organized, and analyzed. It is a sub-field of geography, specifically part of technical geography. It has applications to both physical geography and human geography, although its techniques can be applied to many other fields of study as well as many different industries.
Spatial analysis is any of the formal techniques which studies entities using their topological, geometric, or geographic properties. Spatial analysis includes a variety of techniques using different analytic approaches, especially spatial statistics. It may be applied in fields as diverse as astronomy, with its studies of the placement of galaxies in the cosmos, or to chip fabrication engineering, with its use of "place and route" algorithms to build complex wiring structures. In a more restricted sense, spatial analysis is geospatial analysis, the technique applied to structures at the human scale, most notably in the analysis of geographic data. It may also be applied to genomics, as in transcriptomics data.
Eman Ghoneim is an Egyptian/American geomorphologist. In March 2006, Dr. Ghoneim, together with Farouk El-Baz, discovered the Kebira Crater, a possible impact crater (astrobleme) in the Sahara. In 2007, while processing microwave space data, she discovered an ancient Mega-Lake (30,750 km2) buried beneath the sand of the Great Sahara in Northern Darfur, Sudan. In May 2024, Ghoneim and her team, using Radar Remote Sensing, discovered a long-lost ancient branch of the Nile River that they called the Ahramat Branch (meaning the Pyramids Branch in Arabic” since it borders the largest concentration of pyramids field in Egypt. The discovered Ahramat Branch would most likely play a vital role in the pyramids’ construction. The branch was used as a transportation waterway for workmen and building materials to the pyramids’ sites
Geography is the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding of Earth and its human and natural complexities—not merely where objects are, but also how they have changed and come to be. While geography is specific to Earth, many concepts can be applied more broadly to other celestial bodies in the field of planetary science. Geography has been called "a bridge between natural science and social science disciplines."
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are an increasingly important component of business, healthcare, security, government, trade, media, transportation and tourism industries and operations in China. GIS software is playing an increasing role in the way Chinese companies analyze and manage business operations.
The UNSW School of Surveying and Geospatial Engineering (SAGE), part of the UNSW Faculty of Engineering, was founded in 1970 and disestablished in 2013.
Barry N. Haack is an American geographer and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Geography and Geoinformation Science at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is an international authority on remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), and technology transfer from developed to developing nations. Haack is a visiting physical scientist at the United States Geological Survey and an elected Fellow in the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS). Through education and collaboration, Haack has influenced the careers of scientists and decision makers from many United States federal agencies and in universities and agencies in nearly thirty countries. He has held formal arrangements with the United Nations, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, NASA, the European Space Agency, the National Geographic Society, and many other international organizations and country governmental agencies.
Sisi Zlatanova is a Bulgarian/Dutch researcher in geospatial data, geographic information systems, and 3D modeling. She works as a professor in the faculty of the Built Environment, at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and is president of Technical Commission IV (Spatial Information Science) of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.
Karen Ching-Yee Seto is a geographer, urbanisation and land change scientist, and Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanisation Science at Yale University. She is an expert on urbanisation and sustainability, and satellite remote sensing. She was the co-lead for the chapter on urban mitigation in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th Assessment Report and IPCC 5th Assessment Report. From 2014 to 2020, she was the co-editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Global Environmental Change. She is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Jeff Dozier is an American snow hydrologist, environmental scientist, researcher and academic. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Founding Dean of the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Mahyat Shafapour Tehrany, is an Iranian geomatic engineer specializing in GIS, natural hazards and data analysis.
Susan Ustin is an American earth scientist who is the Distinguished Professor of Environmental Resource Science at the John Muir Institute for the Environment, University of California, Davis. Her research makes use of remote sensing technology to understand the characteristics of plant communities.
Biswajeet Pradhan is a spatial scientist, modeller, author and who is now working as a Distinguished Professor and the founding Director of the Centre for Advanced Modelling and Geo-spatial Information Systems (CAMGIS), Faculty of Engineering and IT at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. He is working primarily in the fields of remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), complex modelling, machine learning and Artificial intelligence (AI) based algorithms and their application to natural hazards, natural resources and environmental problems. Many of his research outputs were put into practice. His research platform is mainly Asia and Australia, and he has been sharing his findings worldwide. He is also a permanent resident of Australia and Malaysia.
Qihao Weng is an American geographer, urban, environmental sustainability, and remote sensing scientist. He has been a Chair Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University since July 2021, and was the Director of the Center for Urban and Environmental Change and is a professor of geography in the Department of Earth and Environmental Systems at the Indiana State University.
Technical geography is the branch of geography that involves using, studying, and creating tools to obtain, analyze, interpret, understand, and communicate spatial information.