Modern computer technologies are necessary tools for interdisciplinary cross-sectoral analysis of environmental problems and efficient environmental decision-making. They are essential on each stage of environmental management process starting with monitoring, data collection and storage to decision support, results visualization and presentation.
During the academic year students have obtained knowledge and skills in many areas of Environmental Sciences, Policy and Management (ESPM). These courses were focused on introduction of all aspects of ESPM to students trained and worked in specific areas.
The underlying idea of this course is to provide students with an opportunity to integrate all skills and knowledge they have obtained.
The course aims at combining ecological, social, political and economic principles for the development of sustainable regional management policies and conducting of their feasibility studies. It is proposed that this course will assist students to translate environmental, social and economic principles into practical management plans for ecological systems.
Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) will be used during the course as a subject for student case studies.
Course will also integrate existing environmental management practices and GIS mapping and modelling approaches.
The aim of this unit is to introduce to students the idea, methodology and basic tools of environmental modeling. Models are essential in environmental management. In order to better understand environmental systems, to predict their behaviour and to develop effective management strategies it is crucially important to bring together ecological, socio-economic and technological aspects of the specific environmental problem. To secure such an interdisciplinary analysis of the numerous factors, consensus-building among various experts and facilitate results communication to the decision-makers the system dynamics and process-based modelling techniques are often used. Though different alternative approaches to environmental modelling are to be discussed the course will mainly focus on obtaining practical skills in process-based simulation.
In this course students will continue their practical acquaintance with geospatial mapping and analysis using ArcView and some free software packages (to be specified). The course introduces digital analysis of geospatial phenomena and provides foundations in methods and algorithms used in GIS analysis. It builds up on the practical skills in geospatial data mining and practical skills in using GIS tools obtained during “ICT for environmental professionals” course. In addition to our last term activities on geospatial data visualization we will concentrate more on data processing and analysis.
This course is a part of the Introduction to Methods of Environmental Inquiry stream. The aim of the course is to acquaint students with techniques for gathering, interpreting and presenting data which they will need to use in the course of their masters studies. Emphasis is placed on practical knowledge.
