CIPSEM Lecture. GIS for environmental studies

For the last 9 years I have been giving a lecture on GIS and Remote Sensing for environmental studies at the Centre for Postgraduate Studies on Environmental Management (CIPSEM) at TU-Dresden. This is a training in fundamentals of GIS and Remote Sensing where participants are expected to develop their spatial skills in image processing and vector geoprocessing. I focus on conceptual implications and practical applications of this powerful tools, with the objective to allow students to develop their own spatial data set, from the scratch, once back in their respective countries. Like other years, I fully enjoyed sharing time, experience …

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WMCAUS 2017 PRAGUE – CONFERENCE SESSION ON URBAN HEAT ISLAND

With my friend and colleague Dr. Massimo Palme, we had an excellent and very successful session on urban heat island in Prague during the WMCAUS 2017 conference. We had six fascinating presentations UHI at the urban scale: measurement methods and indicators Simulation of UHI at urban/building scale Effects of UHI in public health Impacts of UHI on energy consumption We would like to thank our colleagues and friends from Argentina, Chile, Italy, Poland, Romania and Spain for joining our symposium.                 The WMCAUS conference has already published the full contribution in an indexed …

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COLLOQUIUM – The socio-economic dimension in resilience studies in Latin America

The first week of December 2016 I was kindly invited by prof. Dr. Matthias Kiese, from the Institute of Geography at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, to give a lecture on urban resilience. I was for long having the wish to talk about Patagonia again, so this was the perfect occasion. Based on the example of the socio-ecological system of Punta Arenas, the southernmost continental Latin American city, in the presentation I have illustrated how the socio-economic dimension plays a fundamental role in the long-term resilience.

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Dynamics of urbanization and Ecosystem Services provision in Latin America

Research about ecosystem services and urbanization is increasing in Latin America. From science & research point of view, it is still necessary to pave the way to put the framework of ecosystem services (ES) into practice, to translating the ES framework to applied disciplines such as urban planning, land planning, and management. This research project attempts to cope with this issue by making a spatial-temporal analysis of UHI trends,

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El uso de los SIG en los estudios urbanos

La primera semana de Diciembre de 2013 fui invitado a exponer en el Coloquio “Teledetección. Recursos naturales y estudios urbanos” en la Universidad Mayor.  El encuentro, que buscaba discutir los alcances y atributos de la teledetección, fue organizado por el Centro de Energía, Medio Ambiente y Ordenamiento Territorial (ROAM), en conjunto con la Facultad de Arquitectura y el programa de Magíster en Teledetección, impartido por la Facultad de Ciencias Silvoagropecuarias. (more…)

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Monitoring ecosystem dynamics in northwestern Ethiopia

Our paper about ecosystem dynamics in northwestern Ethiopia was published in Applied Geography (Q1 journal with a 5-year Impact Factor of 3.162) in February 2017. In this very much remote sensing piece we used a nice quantitative method for monitoring NDVI and climate variables. The aim was to assess long-term trends in dryland vegetation variability. Even though this topic has been largely treated in the scientific literature our innovative approach was to assess such dynamics in a spatiotemporal manner, focusing on “breakpoints” to disentangle general trends from abrupt changes. Using this approach is possible to identify non-environmental driving factors, such …

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