NASA International Space Apps Challenge 2018 in Tartu

Space Apps is a two-days international hackathon that occurs in cities around the world, globally coordinated by NASA. It is an annual event that pulls citizens together regardless of their background or skill level to address challenges we face on Earth and in Space. Project teams were formed to work on specific topics that they either developed themselves or were suggested by sponsors, the panel or ourselves. The teams' results were then presented and judged by a panel at the end of the event. Overall it can be concluded that this was a very successful event: the teams developed substantial solutions and got engaged with industry and entrepreneurship; inter-departmental and inter-sectoral networks for the research institutes have been strengthened in particular between the organising institutes and with the Tartu Science Park/ESA Business Incubator and several leading innovative (geospatial) software companies.The Department of Geography, the Institute of Computer Science and the Tartu Observatory jointly organised and hosted a 48h hackathon event as part of the 2018 International NASA SpaceApps Challenge. This global event happened on the weekend 19.-21. October 2018 at more than 200 locations, 75 countries, world-wide over the course of the weekend, with Tartu as the only Estonian location. The main goal was to provide a safe platform for motivated students from various backgrounds to work together on real problems in a hackathon event, while at the same time learning the benefits of interdisciplinary work, combined team work with different skills. The second goal was to foster networking between the research institutes and the geospatial industry in Tartu, and expose students to the field of geospatial and Earth Observation (EO) applications

International Space Apps Challenge 2019 in Tartu

Space Apps is a two-days international hackathon that occurs in cities around the world, globally coordinated by NASA. It is an annual event that pulls citizens together regardless of their background or skill level to address challenges we face on Earth and in Space. Project teams were formed to work on specific topics that they either developed themselves or were suggested by sponsors, the panel or ourselves. The teams' results were then presented and judged by a panel at the end of the event. From overall 69 registrations initially, we eventually had 8 teams formed from 50 participants. This year Earth Observation was the main topic. We aimed to encourage the hackathon participants to use ESA and NASA satellite remote sensing and other global data as an ingredient to solve problems that matter. Like last year, we wanted to provide a safe platform for motivated students from various backgrounds to work together on real problems in a hackathon event, while at the same time learning the benefits of interdisciplinary work and combined team work with different skills. The second goal was to foster networking between the research institutes and the geospatial industry in Tartu, and expose students to the field of geospatial and Earth Observation (EO) applications.The Department of Geography, the Tartu Observatory and Tartu Science Park jointly organised and hosted a 48h hackathon event as part of the 2019 International Space Apps Challenge. This global event happened on the weekend 18.-20. October 2019 at more than 225 locations, 80 countries, world-wide over the course of the weekend with more than 29.000 participants, and with Tartu as the only Estonian location. We are organising this event in Tartu for the second time, after the debut in 2018. Overall it can be concluded that this was again a very successful event: the teams developed substantial solutions and got engaged with industry and entrepreneurship; inter-departmental and inter-sectoral networks for the research institutes have been strengthened in particular between the organising institutes and with the Tartu Science Park/ESA Business Incubator and several leading innovative (geospatial) software companies, such as CGI, KappaZeta and Datel

Improving reproducibility of geospatial conference papers: lessons learned from a first implementation of reproducibility reviews

Ponència presentada a The 15th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing celebrat a Tromsø, Noruega, el 18 de novembre de 2020In an attempt to increase the reproducibility of contributions to a long-running and established geospatial conference series, the 23rd AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science 2020 (https://agile-online.org/conference-2020) for the first time provided guidelines on preparing reproducible papers (Nüst et al., 2020) and appointed a reproducibility committee to evaluate computational workflows of accepted papers ( https://www.agile-giscience-series.net/review_process.html). Here, the committee’s members report on the lessons learned from reviewing 23 accepted full papers and outline future plans for the conference series. In summary, six submissions were partially reproduced by reproducibility reviewers, whose reports are published openly on OSF ( https://osf.io/6k5fh/). These papers are promoted with badges on the proceedings’ website (https://agile-giss.copernicus.org/articles/1/index.html). Compared to previous years’ submissions (cf. Nüst et al. 2018), the guidelines and increased community awareness markedly improved reproducibility. However, the reproduction attempts also revealed problems, most importantly insufficient documentation. This was partly mitigated by the non-blind reproducibility review, conducted after paper acceptance, where interaction between reviewers and authors can provide the input and attention needed to increase reproducibility. However, the reviews also showed that anonymisation and public repositories, when properly documented, can enable a successful reproduction without interaction, as was the case with one manuscript. Individual and organisational challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the conference’s eventual cancellation increased the teething problems. Nevertheless, also under normal circumstances, future iterations will have to reduce the reviewer’s efforts to be sustainable, ideally by more readily executable workflows and a larger reproducibility committee. Furthermore, we discuss changes to the reproducibility review process and their challenges. Reproducibility reports could be made available to “regular” reviewers, or the reports could be considered equally for acceptance/rejection decisions. Insufficient information or invalid arguments for not disclosing material could then lead to a submission being rejected or not being sent out to peer review. Further organisational improvements are a publication of reviewers’ activities in public databases, making the guidelines mandatory, and collecting data on used tools/repositories, spent efforts, and communications. Finally, we summarise the revision of the guidelines, including their new section for reproducibility reviewers, and the status of the initiative “Reproducible Publications at AGILE Conferences” (https://reproducible-agile.github.io/initiative/), which we connect to related undertakings such as CODECHECK (Eglen et al., 2019). The AGILE Conference’s experiences may help other communities to transition towards more open and reproducible research publications

Future soil loss in highland Ethiopia under changing climate and land use

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10113-020-01617-

Increasing fragmentation of forest cover in Brazil’s Legal Amazon from 2001 to 2017

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62591-

Vertical Accuracy of Freely Available Global Digital Elevation Models (ASTER, AW3D30, MERIT, TanDEM-X, SRTM, and NASADEM)

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/12/21/348

EstSoil-EH: a high-resolution eco-hydrological modelling parameters dataset for Estonia

https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/13/83/2021