EEO-AGI(S) Series Programme

Friday 20th January 2012, 4pm

Dr. David Fairbairn
Newcastle University

Title: Assessing the Accuracy of Crowdsourced Data
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The use of informal, crowd-sourced geospatial data collected by non-professional volunteers (volunteered geographic information, VGI), is often regarded as a panacea for projects which are confronted by inadequate or unattainable official information. This seminar will examine how 'good' such informal data is, by assessing its quality using a number of different measures. Any integration of VGI and formal datasets, which is already happening in several applications, must take account of relative accuracies, completeness, currency and meaning. The results of tests on some of these metrics will be described.

Friday 3rd February 2012, 4pm

Andy Wightman
Independent Writer and Researcher

Title: The Poor Had No Lawyers - who owns Scotland (and how they got it)
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The talk will cover:

• The broad theme of the book
• The historic quest for information (incl. The Inland Revenue Survey)
• The author's experiences with Ordnance Survey
• The Crown Estate Commission
• Future challenges for land information and land reform

Friday 17th February 2012, 4pm

Dr. Iain Cameron
Remote Sensing and GIS Consultant, Environment Systems

Title: UAV's and You: How Unmanned Aerial Vehicles can change how we capture geospatial information
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In the last few years civilian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV's) have become increasingly affordable and accessible, providing the capability to capture aerial imagery in a timely, accurate and cost effective manner. In this talk I will introduce the opportunities arising from UAV remote sensing and discuss how UAV's can support established survey techniques, particularly in the field of environmental monitoring.

Friday 2nd March 2012, 4pm

Dr. Geoff Smith
Director, Specto Natura

Title: The Role of EO Consultants and SMEs within GMES
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Environmental information is of crucial importance to understand how our planet and its climate are changing, the role played by human activities in these changes and how these will influence our daily lives.

The European Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) program aims to provide, or support the provision of, this information through a range of operational Earth Observation-based products and services. The products and services will address a number of key themes; marine, land, atmosphere, emergency, security and climate change. GMES also covers the space component, with the provision of data from the soon to be launched Sentinel series of satellites, and the in-situ component, by the coordination of Member State activities. Policymakers and public authorities at the EU level, the major users of GMES core products and services, will use the information to prepare, implement and monitor environmental legislation and policies across Europe. However, the GMES core products will also be the foundations for downstream services which will operate at the sub-EU level addressing Member State, Regions and local authorities.

The core services offer sustainable pan European input data which will promote the development of downstream services which offer a major opportunity for small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the EO sector to expand their activities within a realistic local context. The current FP7 project GMES for Regions: Awareness and Access Link (GRAAL) will build a platform to help users better specify their demands for EO-based services and for SMEs to better market and promote the services they are offering. The next few years will therefore be a very important and exciting time in the European EO industry and this presentation will describe how the GMES Land theme has developed and some of the opportunities that lie ahead for SMEs.

See:

http://www.gmes.info

http://www.gmes-geoland.info/

http://www.land.eu/

http://www.gmes4regions.eu/

Dr. Geoff Smith, Specto Natura Ltd., is an Earth Observation(EO) consultant with over 20 years experience in academia, government and industry. He has a PhD in imaging spectroscopy of vegetation from the University of Wales, Swansea and postgraduate qualifications in geophysics and EO. He has worked extensively with UK government delivering products and advice as well as representing UK interests at the European Level. He worked within a UK government agency undertaking a range of activities from blue-skies research to operational applications and has been responsible for successful bids to the UK government, the European Commission and the European Environment Agency. He has been involved in GMES from its early days working on the FP5 BIOPRESS, FP6 Geoland, FP6 BOSS4GMES projects and is now involved in other land related FP7 projects (Geoland 2, HELM, MS-MONINA & GRAAL). His focus is on land cover mapping activities with a user perspective and has provided technical input and management to UK national land cover map and CLC production projects. Previously, he was the head of the Section for EO at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, UK.

Friday 23rd March 2012, 4pm

Martin Charlton
National Centre for Geocomputation, NUI Maynooth, Ireland

Title: Geographically Weighted Regression: Modelling Spatial Heterogeneity
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Geographically Weighted Regression is a technique for exploratory spatial data analysis. In "normal" regression with data for spatial objects we assume that the relationship we are modelling is uniform across the study area - that is, the estimated regression parameters are "whole-map" statistics. In many situations this is not necessarily the case, as mapping the residuals (the differences between the observed and predicted data) may reveal. Many different solutions have been proposed for dealing with spatial variation in these relationships. GWR provides means of modelling such relationships.

This seminar outlines the characteristics of spatial data and the challenges its use poses for analysis, the ideas underpinning geographically weighted regression and details the process of estimating and interpreting the outputs from GWR models. We finish with a brief survey of current issues in GWR and potential future developments.

Friday 11th May 2012

3pm, Room 2.13, Geography - *NB Change of Time and Room*

Prof. Martin Herold
Professor of Remote Sensing, Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing,
Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Title: Remote sensing capacities for REDD+: status and prospects
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This seminar qualifies for 1.5 points under the AGI Professional Development scheme.