Results

Four young people stand in front of a map with marked routes holding red objects in their hands
  • In category: Smart Mobility
Use Case: Supporting Emergency Response with ResQMesh and openrouteservice
ResQMesh uses openrouteservice to find emergency response routes from the most recent location of a rescue team leader to where a civilian has reported distress….
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Two photos showing people engaged in emergency planning activities with documents and models on tables
  • In category: Geoinformation for Humanitarian Aid
Emergency Needs Assessment Planning and Information Management (ENAPIM) Training for the Baltic National Societies and Civil Protection

In late August, our colleague supported the technical design of the Emergency Needs Assessment Planning and Information Management (ENAPIM) Training for the Baltic National Societies and Civil Protection, and co-facilitated…

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Hands holding markers and pointing at a map on a table with aerial farmland and urban area in the background
  • In category: Research
New Paper “ACTION: Making Remote Sensing and Volunteered Geographic Information Decision-Ready”
In a new perspective paper, the authors argue that geospatial decision-making suffers from a lack of workflows in which remote sensing (RS) and volunteered geographic information (VGI) meet before a…
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the graphic shows three images: a forest fire, drought and a tiger mosquito
  • In category: Research
New paper in Nature Human Behaviour “Rising health inequities require looking beyond health systems”
Global health inequity is increasingly driven by the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. Addressing this requires placing health at the center of climate and environmental…
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Aerial view of an urban area with buildings, roads, parked cars, and trees
  • In category: Climate Action, Smart Mobility
Two Tools for Shade-Aware Urban Planning
Free, high-resolution shade data for European cities, together with two analysis tools that complement each other at the planning level. With our tools we want to support local governments and…
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Map showing residential area in Pfaffengrund, Heidelberg, with building size classes marked in different colors and private plots and leisure areas indicated
  • In category: Research
New paper “Effects of urban building structures on the distribution of Aedes albopictus in Pfaffengrund, Heidelberg”
In response to the increasing abundance and spread of the invasive mosquito Aedes albopictus in Germany, this study examines how the effectiveness of control measures on breeding sites is influenced…
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Group of four people walking on a paved path with one person holding a bicycle and another pointing ahead
  • In category: Climate Action
What Makes a Place Walkable? Expanding the Way We Measure Walkability 
​​What makes a place walkable goes beyond ​​whether​​ a footpath exists. ​​In collaboration with Walk21, HeiGIT has expanded its walkability assessment tool hiWalk with new indicators ​that capture some of…
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Aerial view of a densely built settlement with scattered small houses near a water body
  • In category: Research
New paper “Open-access model for detecting openly dumped dispersed municipal solid waste from crowdsourced UAV imagery in Sub-Saharan Africa”
Openly dumped waste is a serious environmental and public health problem in many fast-growing cities, but small and scattered amounts of waste are often hard to track. A recent study…
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Hexagonal photo of Mongolian rangelands with yurts and a river next to a hexagonal map showing land degradation in various colors
  • In category: Research
GeoAI for Land Degradation, Climate Resilience and Sustainable Development in Mongolia’s Rangelands
We combined Earth observation, an innovative custom-built deep-learning model, and spatial planning to map the condition of the rangelands around Töv province and Ulaanbaatar. The resulting maps provide actionable insights…
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View of a densely packed informal settlement with small houses and the text 'NEW PAPER Climate-sensitive urban energy poverty indicator framework'
  • In category: Research
New Paper “Climate-sensitive urban energy poverty indicator framework”
New paper published in Communications Sustainability, editorially selective open-access journal from the Nature Portfolio, presents the Climate-Sensitive Urban Energy Poverty Indicator Framework, which assesses household energy poverty under climate-sensitive urban…
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View from a vehicle driving on a dirt road in a rural area with houses and people visible alongside the road
  • In category: Geoinformation for Humanitarian Aid
Collecting Street-Level Imagery in Mozambique to Advance Sustainable Development and Humanitarian Logistics
HeiGIT and Data4MOZ have launched a collaboration to collect street-level imagery in Mozambique, combining local field expertise with geospatial capacity to advance technologies for humanitarian logistics and actionable data for…
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Indoor plants with sunlight shining through a window and overlaid text about indoor dwelling habitability and systematic review
  • In category: Research
New Paper “Indoor Dwelling Habitability: Conceptual Evolution, Methods, and Key Variables from a Systematic Review”
Indoor dwelling habitability affects health, comfort, and housing performance, but there is still no standardized approach for assessing it. This systematic review examines how the concept has evolved, which methods…
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Hexagonal grid map with color-coded data points and a faint background map, accompanied by text 'Looking Back at the #30DayMapChallenge 2025' and the HeiGIT logo
  • In category: General
Looking Back at the #30DayMapChallenge 2025

Every November, the #30DayMapChallenge encourages people around the world to make and share maps, with a different theme each day. Cartographer and geographer Topi Tjukanov started the challenge in 2019,…

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Map with blue and purple shaded areas and black dots on the right and red network lines on the bottom right with text 'Looking Back at the #30DayMapChallenge 2024' on the left
  • In category: General
Looking Back at the #30DayMapChallenge 2024

Each November, the #30DayMapChallenge invites people worldwide to create and share maps, with a new theme for every day of the month. Started in 2019 by Finnish geographer and cartographer…

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Group of four people standing behind a round table with a laptop, three smiling and one giving a thumbs-up gesture
  • In category: General
Advancing GeoAI through International Collaboration
HeiGIT recently welcomed Prof. Dr. Wenwen Li and Prof. Dr. Song Gao for research visits focused on GeoAI, multimodal geospatial data, human mobility, and disaster response. Their visits strengthened international…
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Sunlight filtering through large trees lining a city street with people walking and vehicles moving
  • In category: Climate Action, Press Releases
When tree shade points the way
Analysis tool shows where shade already exists and where trees should be planted for cooler, more walkable streets….
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Three people working on laptops in a meeting room with a map on a screen and text reading 'Update of the roadmap toward the new ohsome API 2.0'
  • In category: Big Spatial Data Analytics
Update of the roadmap toward the new ohsome API 2.0

Last year, we published our initial roadmap toward ohsome 2.0, outlining a transition from our established OpenStreetMap History Database (OSHDB) toward a Postgres backend enhanced by PostGIS and Citus. This…

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Map showing the complex border layout of Baarle-Hertog with irregular shapes and enclaves
  • In category: Big Spatial Data Analytics
Rebuilding geometry assembly from the ground up with ohsome-planet 1.3.1
We are releasing version 1.3.1 of ohsome-planet under the codename “Baarle-Hertog”. This tool is designed to facilitate the transformation of raw OpenStreetMap (OSM) history data into the GeoParquet format, making…
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Map with a red route line and a photo of a disaster area with collapsed buildings and rubble
  • In category: Geoinformation for Humanitarian Aid, Smart Mobility
Dynamic routing for disaster response in Venezuela

Following the catastrophic earthquakes in Venezuela on June 24, 2026, humanitarian organizations face a compromised operational landscape. With over 3,600 confirmed fatalities and tens of thousands missing, the immediate priority…

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Outdoor event with people walking near white tents and a laptop showing a computer vision interface on a table indoors with people in the background
  • In category: General, Geoinformation for Humanitarian Aid
A Computer Vision Workshop with Tomorrow’s Mappers
At Explore Science 2026, young students experimented with computer vision for humanitarian mapping: an occasion to learn how AI models are trained and why human input remains essential for generating…
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