The OSUN GeoHub project held a lecture on February 7th featuring Dezső Mikus, an expert in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and environmental management from Trenecon Ltd. Mr Mikus's talk, "GIS in Use – Case Studies from the Environmental Sector" gave a useful and informative overview of how GIS technology is used to tackle real-world environmental problems.
Mr Mikus started by describing the history of GIS, from its first uses in 19th-century public health issues to the advanced AI-powered geospatial tools we have today. He pointed out the main parts of a GIS, which are data, hardware, software, and, most importantly, knowledge - knowing how to use these things well.
Mr Mikus presented a series of interesting case studies from his many projects. He described a tricky railway network planning project, showing how LiDAR point cloud data was used to build accurate 3D models for detailed analysis. This helped find the land parcels affected and who owned them, and also to understand the possible environmental impacts. Mr Mikus also shared what he learned from a city carbon neutrality assessment, showing how GIS was very important in figuring out if large-scale solar energy production was possible. This involved looking at roof shapes with LiDAR data and LOD2 models, figuring out sun angles to calculate how much electricity could be made, doing cost-benefit analyses, and looking at geothermal energy as an alternative.
Another important case study was about flood hazard and risk mapping. Mr Mikus explained how flood hazard maps are made based on things like rainfall, runoff, and water accumulation. He then described how these hazard maps are combined with data on vulnerability and exposure - for instance, how many people live somewhere, what infrastructure is there, and its economic value - to create complete flood risk assessments. He talked about the difficulties of estimating how many people are affected, especially in places with limited or old census data, and explained the complex process of calculating possible economic damage using risk curves and assigning values to different things like agriculture, city development, and crucial infrastructure.
Throughout his talk, Mr Mikus openly discussed the real-world challenges faced when working with GIS data, such as managing big and complex datasets (like LiDAR and satellite images), the problems of data quality and availability, the often-difficult process of getting data ready and cleaning it (for instance, making sure river networks connect properly), and the trouble of estimating how many people live in places where data is scarce. He also stressed the importance of balancing different interests, using the example of the trade-offs between installing solar panels and having shade trees in city parking lots, and the need to clearly explain the results and limits of GIS analyses to decision-makers.
The talk ended with a lively question-and-answer session, giving everyone a chance to explore the topics more and get a better understanding of how GIS is used in practice to deal with hard environmental problems.