On April 12th 2018, the first Research Software Engineers (RSEs) for geosciences meeting was held at the European Geophysical Union (EGU) General Assembly (GA) in Vienna, Austria. The EGU GA is a huge event with over 15.000 people from more than 100 countries. It has a diverse programme with thousands of posters and hundreds of sessions, but what it lacked was an event to bring together scientists ...[Read More]
Good practice in the evaluation of researchers
A new statement on good practice in the evaluation of researchers and research programmes has been posted by three national academies (Académie des Sciences, Leopoldina and Royal Society). It states that “the use of bibliometric indicators for early career scientists must in particular be avoided. Such use will tend to push scientists who are building their career into wellestablished/fashio ...[Read More]
Strengthening Early Career Scientists (ECS) in EGU ESSI
Photo by Štefan Štefančík on Unsplash
The number of presentations from ECS in the ESSI sessions has been low during recent EGU General Assemblies. We are hence currently trying to get greater involvement and recognition for the ECS in the ESSI Division. How to get involved as ECS in the ESSI division? Join the ESSI ECS mailing list We have a dedicated ESSI ECS mailing list that can be used for discussion between the ESSI ECSs. It is a ...[Read More]
PICO in the picture
Like everyone else, in the beginning I was skeptical of the newly introduced presentation format at the EGU – the PICO sessions. PICO stands for Presenting Interactive Content. Half talk, half poster – this is a new design that demands a completely new and unfamiliar preparation of the presenter, and yes admittedly at first this meant additional work. However, already during the creation of my fir ...[Read More]
New ECS representative!
At the EGU ESSI division meeting, Christoph Stasch was elected as the new representative of the early career scientists in the ESSI division following Jennifer Roelens. Christoph works as research associate and consultant at 52°North, a non-profit research organisation in the field of applied geoinformatics. His focus is on simplifying the integration of sensors and processing modules (e.g. enviro ...[Read More]
Happy GISday!!
As many people within the ESSI division have at least once used GIS software, we would like to wish you a happy GIS day! Every day, millions of decisions are being powered by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for education, government, non-profit organizations and businesses. ESSI deals with community-driven and multidisciplinary challenges. GIS plays an important role to develop data-dr ...[Read More]
Boon of big data for geoscience investigations
The amount of digital data per person is rising with a geometric progression since 2009. According to the latest report of Oyster IMS, the digital universe will grow by a factor of 300 between 2005 and 2020: from 130 Exabytes to 40,000 Exabytes, or 40 trillion gigabytes (more than 5,200 gigabytes for every person in 2020). Earth sciences is one of the domains where huge volumes of data are collect ...[Read More]
Big Earth Science Data – Boon or bane?
We are in the era of Big Data. Big Data is a ‘hot’ topic. It is a popular term often associated with an increase in volume, variety and velocity of data. The Copernicus programme for example, the European Union’s flagship programme on monitoring the Earth’s environment using satellite and in-situ observations, anticipates a massive increase in satellite data volume. It is estimated tha ...[Read More]