UNIGE – Switzerland [ Project Coordinator ]

The University of Geneva was founded in 1559 and is a world-class university, made up of 9 faculties and one of the 20 members of the League of European Research Universities. The Institute for Environmental Sciences (ISE) is an inter-faculty entity of the University of Geneva created formally in March 2009. The Institute’s main objectives are to undertake research and teaching activities in the numerous inter-connected domains of the environment, such as climate, water, biodiversity, health, energy, urban ecology and environmental governance. Within ISE, the enviroSPACE laboratory of Prof. Anthony Lehmann (Spatial Predictions and Analyses in Complex Environments) aims at promoting interdisciplinary research based on spatially explicit information and indicators on the present and future state of the environment. Thanks to an Institutional partnership among University of Geneva, the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)/Global Resource Information Database (GRID-Geneva), a close collaboration exists between enviroSPACE and GRID-Geneva. Both teams are sharing infrastructure resources, staff, and are participating in common projects.

The project will essentially be implemented by:

  • Prof. Anthony Lehmann (M) has a PhD in Ecology, and was coordinator of the FP7 enviroGRIDS project. He will coordinate all WPs and participate in different tasks.
  • Dr Nicolas Ray (M) has a PhD in Biology and was manager of the enviroGRIDS and coordinator of the EOPOWER FP7 projects. He will work in WP5, participates to different tasks of WP 7 and WP9, and ensure the liaison with the UNEP-GRID team.
  • Dr Grégory Giuliani (M) is a geologist with a PhD in Spatial Data Infrastructure for the Environment. He is leading the Capacity building task of GEO. He will work on different tasks of WP5 and lead WP7.
  • Dr Pierre Lacroix (M) has a background in Earth Sciences and a PhD in Environmental Sciences. He has more than 12 years of experience in GIS and Spatial Database management. He will lead WP5.
  • Martin Lacayo (M) is a PhD candidate at UNIGE with a strong capacity on geospatial programming. He will work on task 7.7 to develop the EU-SDGs dashboard.
  • Prof. Pascal Peduzzi (M) has a PhD in Environmental Sciences and is the Director of GRID-Geneva. He will participate to different tasks of WP7
  • Dr. Denisa Rodila (F) has a PhD in both Environmental Sciences and Computer Sciences. She is a certified PMI project manager, and will manage the project in addition to participating to tasks in WP5 and WP7.
  • Ms. Erica Honeck (F) has a Master in Environmental Sciences and will participate with her PhD to WP 4 on Biodiversity and Ecosystem

Key expertise:

Both enviroSPACE and UNIGE-GRID teams are specialized in performing spatially-explicit modeling, by handling and analyzing spatial and statistical data on environmental and natural resource issues through Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remotely-sensed imagery. The teams also specialized in downscaling and upscaling of environmental data and indicators, and in developing geo computation workflows with distributed computing infrastructures linked to spatial data infrastructures, using international (meta)data standards (e.g., ISO, OGC) and initiatives (e.g., GEOSS, INSPIRE). Capacity building on Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and GEOSS-related issues is also a key asset of the team.

Thematic domains of expertise include:

  • Species distribution modeling: statistical models and GIS
  • Natural habitat mapping: Remote sensing, GIS, statistics and expert knowledge
  • Ecosystem services: spatially-explicit assessment of ES
  • Hydrological modeling: process based models of hydrology
  • Climatic scenarios: downscaling of regional climatic models
  • Land use change modeling: spatially explicit models of land use change