Category Archives: meeting

Landscape highlighted in Bulgarian event

8 January 2024environment, GIA, GIS, landscape, meeting, Natura2000, policy, projectKarl Donert

A recent project event, part of a series of successful seminars, was held on Wednesday October 13, 2023 in Ruse, Bulgaria by GEOLAND partners from Ruse Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The GEOLAND project was celebrated with e dedicated seminar about “The role of technology in the protection of the Bulgarian landscape“, in line with the mission of the project. Educators, teachers, students and citizens had the opportunity to learn more about how it is possible to implement GIS technology in education, services, conservation of our nature and cultural heritage and influence policy developments.

Mr. Ayri Memishev, coordinator of the GEOLAND project for on behalf of RCCI, kicked-off the event by presenting the project and the products developed so far. The participants were informed about the specialised handbook for the protection of the landscape and objects of Natura 2000, through GIS technologies and the available e-platform for collecting geographic (and not only) data for the exploitation of various spatial objects.

Distinguished guest speakers also joined the event to talk facilitate the discussion on how technology contributes to many areas of landscape preservation:

• Mr. Nikolay Kutinchev, Head of the IT Department in Ruse Municipality, who presented the new and innovative GIS portal service and the currently available services for citizens. Mr. Kutinchev informed that soon there is active work on the implementation of numerous data from the presence of waste containers and their location, to pollutants and even abandoned cars within the municipality.

• Mr. Georgi Vladov, from Esri Bulgaria, who talked about the countless possibilities of using ArcGIS and the educational initiatives available for Bulgarian schools and universities. Mr. Vladov expressed his readiness to support the schools in Ruse to use the available (and free) Esri products, as well as their inclusion in the national competition “We study the world with GIS“, supported by the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science of Bulgaria.

• Prof. Georgi Hristov, from “Angel Kanchev” University of Ruse, who demonstrated how thanks to modern technologies such as drones, digital twins and photogrammetry, existing objects of culture can be preserved, including objects and places are yet to be discovered during infrastructural changes and planning.

• Mrs. Reni Petrova, chief expert at the Regional Environmental and Water Inspection -Ruse, who showed the sites of Natura2000 in the Ruse region requiring attention, as well as some of the educational initiatives in which students and teachers can be involved. Mrs. Petrova informed the participants that soon we can expect to have a specialised unit that will deal only with issues related to the directive and future educational programs in this regard.

The event was attended by 25 participants, who rated it of high interest and quality, while recognising the wider application of GIS technologies and the importance of landscape preservation.

Piloting the landscape app and GIS platform in Zaragossa, Spain

25 August 2023environment, GIS, landscape, meeting, monitoring, Natura2000, output, project, remote sensingKarl Donert

In October 2022 a two-day Transnational Partner Meeting was held in Zaragoza, Spain. Participants spent one day in meetings, discussing the progress of the project with special attention to testing a landscape survey app.

The aim of the landscape survey app is to enable the nature of the landscape to be evaluated in situ by students and by the general public. Its use proved to be very straightforward. By opening the app, GPS locations could be saved, together with responses to a short landscape survey and digital photographs of the location could be gathered and shared.

This app thus permits data gathering of landscape character assessment (LCA) results in the field, linked to a GIS platform where the data gathered is presented.

Landscape character assessment is the process of identifying and describing the variation in character of the landscape.

This helps identify and explain the unique combination of elements and features that make landscapes distinctive.

The character, types and areas can be described and mapped to show how the landscape is perceived, experienced and valued by people. It also allows changes in landscape to be monitored, for example due to climate change or human impact, and policies to protect distinctive areas to be put in place.

Either follow the link or scan the QR code to visit the Landscape Character Assessment online survey app to add your own data to the GIS platform..

On the second day, a field visit to a NATURA 2000 site close to Zaragossa was organised in order to beta test the app and platform. Find out more about Natura 2000 in Aragon

.During the visit five different important locations of landscape value were visited

The first location was a local landfill which serves almost 800.000 habitants of the Zaragoza region for waste deposits. On the other hand it offers a food source for numerous animals and birds, such as vultures, storks and seagulls. The landfill is located on the border of the NATURA 2000 protected area.

The visit continued to the Saltlake of Mediana (La Salada de Mediana) which has huge ecological, historical and scientific value because of the salt extraction activity during the past centuries.

Codo municipality was the next stop, in particular in ornithological reservation El Planerón, where the guide form SEO BirdLife organisation, responsible for the reservation, explained the project, the relationships with other agents in the landscape management and presented to the participants some results of the work done in the reservation.

Then the group stopped in Fuendetodos, birthplace of Francisco Goya, great Spanish painter, where windmill parks with massive energy potential have been installed. The purpose was to evaluate their impact on the landscape and compare it with the benefits that it can bring.

Finally, the viewpoint on Las Planas, next to Cadrete, was visited. From this spot, participants could appreciate the views over the Ebro river depression, the plateau, Zaragoza city, the dry steppe landscape, wind parks and the Moncayo massive in the background.

Explore the Storymap to see the location and results of the field visit

The field visit confirmed the survey app and GIS platform developed for landscape evaluation showed great functionality and produced very relevant results, so in following months it will be used in different European locations with students and the public.

Try out the GEOLAND survey app – Visit the GIS platform

Contact the project of you wish to be involved or find out more.

GEOLAND Greek Multiplier Event held

9 July 2023GIS, meeting, output, projectKarl Donert

@Atlantis Engineering SA is one of the Greek partners participating in the GEOLAND Project. In June 2023 they organised a Multiplier Event in Thessaloniki.

The Multiplier Event is a specific dissemination activity that focused on presenting the first two outputs of the project, the Educational Handbook and the Web-based platform.

Moreover, the 3^rd intellectual output, Policy Recommendations, which is currently being developed, was presented and there was also reference on the students’ online gallery and the digital education readiness assessment, the last two outputs of the project.

The participants, who came from various disciplines, showed great interest on the topics and a very interesting discussion took place during the event.

Partner meeting tests GEOLAND app

5 December 2022GIS, landscape, meeting, monitoring, Natura2000, output, project, remote sensing, UncategorisedKarl Donert

During two days of October 2022, the GEOLAND Transnational Partner Meeting was held in Zaragoza, Spain. All the participants spent one whole day meeting, discussing the latest progress of the project with special attention on the mapping app developed by University of Ghent.

This app permits data gathering in the field and its aim is to allow the landscape to be evaluated in situ by students or even by the public. The use is very simple, everyone just has to open the app, save the GPS location, respond to a short survey and make a photo, which completes the collected information.

Next day, a field visit and app beta testing was scheduled. Five places with important landscape value were visited.

The app developed for the landscape evaluation was shown to present great functionality and very relevant results, so in following months it will be used with students and the general public.

Explore the Storymap to find out more.

Second GeoLand meeting, Ghent Belgium

10 March 2022meeting, projectKarl Donert

The second full meeting of the GeoLand consortium took place in Ghent, Belgium on 7-8 March 2022. Due to Covid restrictions a hybrid meeting was arranged as not all partners were able to travel.

The two main goals of the GEOLAND project are to develop:

1. an Educational Handbook for monitoring European Landscape
2. a Web based GIS platform where numerous geospatial data may be uploaded and analysed and students’ opinion about landscape will be obtained through questionnaires and crowdsourcing.

In the context of the Handbook, the meeting addressed, in a context related to higher education courses, the challenges in identifying and gathering landscape data, analysing the information and relating the results and areas surveyed to policy arrangements in different partner countries.

Landscape assessments were presented and discussed, for example Landscape Character Assessment used in the United Kingdom. The types of existing data were reviewed, like Corrine land cover data as an inventory of land cover in 44 classes. Citizen Science research and methodologies were introduced and some general principles of citizen science discussed.

There are four common features of citizen science practice:
1) anyone can participate,
2) participants use the same protocol so data can be combined and be high quality,
3) data can help real scientists come to real conclusions and
4) a wide community of scientists and volunteers work together and share data to which the public, as well as scientists, have access.

Citizen Science can increasingly be enabled by web-based technologies, in which relatively large-scale data-collection tasks can be assigned to students. The purpose is to gather and collate useful scientific information from many individuals / groups.

GEOLAND Project meeting, Rethymno, Crete

20 September 2021landscape, meeting, projectKarl Donert

Members of the GEOLAND Project team met in the town of Rethymno, Crete 15-18th September 2021. Due to Covid restrictions the meeting was hybrid with some partners participating online and others able to visit the coordinating institution the research centre IMS Forth.

The project focused on administrative and practical actions to deliver the key outputs of GEOLAND and specifically:

1 an educational handbook for monitoring European Landscape

2 a training course via a Web-based GIS platform

3 policy outreach for higher education students related to the European Landscape Convention (ELC) and

4 an online gallery of student work, and

5 a Digital Readiness Tool, DERT, for the assessment of the digital readiness of higher education students and courses.

On the first day of the meeting the project partners focussed on the purpose and content of the GEOLAND handbook and its structure and approach. On the second day the GEOLAND platform purpose and its developments were discussed and the approach agreed and issues addressed. The role of open data from students and the activities related to survey gathering and citizen science were raised.

After the conclusion of the meeting a cultural visit took place, with a visit to the Monastery at Arkadi and a hike through a gorge identified as an area of outstanding landscape value.

GEOLAND Project Starts

14 August 2021meeting, projectmeeting, projectKarl Donert

The GEOLAND Project has started with a series of online meetings to establish the activities and working methods of the project.

The vision of GEOLAND is to establish a learning path for the Higher Education students and their professors so that they are able to apply their geospatial analysis knowledge in decision-making for landscape management, planning and protection of NATURA 2000 sites across Europe.

“Landscape means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” (Art.1 of European Landscape Convention (ELC)).

The main goals of the GEOLAND project are to specifically develop:
a) an Educational Handbook for monitoring European Landscape,
b) a Web based GIS platform where geospatial data may be uploaded and analysed and students’ opinion about landscape will be obtained through questionnaires and crowdsourcing.

More about the project