GIS Laboratory: New Trends in Research and Education in Environmental Science Based on Advanced Computing Tools

This contribution provides an overview of some of the recent research in environmental informatics involving spatio-temporal data processing. Implementation of cloud computing to teach Geographic Information System (GIS) and spatial sciences is described in the framework of a project focused on innovation of the GIS Laboratory. The new age of cloud computing is demonstrated on research issues dealing with environmental science including topics such as monitoring of air pollution with LIDAR, modeling of surface water pollution extended by data from remote sensing, optimization of municipal solid waste collection in urban areas based on linear programming, and modeling of vegetation development in spruce forests with a large set of ordinary differential equations. Other related domains such as image processing in remote sensing, and mobile GIS extended by global positioning system (GPS) are discussed in addition to spatio-temporal processing in the GIS.