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 Geography Dept.

 NUI, Galway

 

1. Spatial Analyses: GIS + Geostatistics --> Environmental Sciences

        Present academic researches in GIS at the department mainly focus on spatial analyses: using GIS spatial analysis functions and geostatistics to study spatial structure of environmental parameters and to produce spatial distribution maps in environmental sciences, e.g., chemical element concentrations in soils, sediments, and water. Studies have been carried out on sediments in the Yangtze River system of China, biogeochemistry of south-eastern Sweden,  soils of Jamaica, sediments of the US, and soils of Ireland.

 

        Current research projects:

• (NEW: Information for soil pollution in South Park  is available here)

• Interactions of soil Hydrology, land use and climate change and their impact on soil quality (funded by EPA STRIVE programme, in collaboration with UCC)

• Characterising spatial variation of heavy metal pollution in urban soils (funded by EPA)

• Spatial variation in grassland soil test phosphorus (funded by Teagasc)

• Use of peat archives from western Ireland to reveal historic global atmospheric pollution of Pb and platinum group elements (funded by Enterprise Ireland)

        Recently finished projects:

• Towards a national soil database (with EPA and Teagasc)

All the datasets, reports, maps, and atlas from this project are available for downloading via EPA websites:

http://www.epa.ie/downloads/pubs/research/land/

http://coe.epa.ie/safer/iso19115/displayISO19115.jsp?isoID=7

• Assessment of the relevance of EU FOCUS groundwater scenarios for Irish environmental conditions (with Department of Agriculture and Food)

• Data mining on SGU geochemical databases (with SGU)

• Data analyses on soil database of Northern Ireland (with DARDNI)

• Soil environmental quality mapping for Galway City

• Spatio-temporal changes of soil organic carbon in Ireland (with Teagasc)

• Hazard assessment of Pb  in soils of the Silvermines area (with Teagasc)

• Statistical characteristics of a large geochemical database (with USGS)

• Online publication of geochemistry of heavy metals in sediments of Leinster area (with GSI)

 

2. Web GIS

 

        Internet GIS is another topic we are interested in. ArcIMS is being used for powerful Internet mapping. Currently available web GIS maps created with another software called "HTML ImageMapper" include:

            Water Quality Monitoring Sites of Lough Corrib

            Soil lead concentration in Silvermines, Co. Tipperary, Ireland

            Soil organic carbon in Ireland

            Online tour to Galway (a simplified GIS map with videos)

   

Comments and suggestions are welcome, contact: Dr. Chaosheng Zhang

Last update: 6/6/2008