The TSNUK GeoForAll Lab was established in 2014 at the Department of Physical Geography and Geoecology, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine. We apply our knowledge and passion for open geospatial to advance research and education in the fields of landscape ecology, nature conservation, environmental planning and management.
We also support cooperation between academic, government, non-government, and industrial organizations on these topics through research, training, development of open source geospatial technologies and public geodata along with the support of their applied adoption.
We have been working on the following projects:
FREEWAT: FREE and Open Source Tools for WATer Resource Management
FREEWAT is a project of the EU framework program for research and innovation HORIZON 2020. FREEWAT main result will be an open source and public domain GIS integrated modeling environment for the simulation of water quantity and quality in surface water and groundwater with an integrated water management and planning module. Within the project we are focusing on the application and approbation of the FREEWAT tools for the research aimed at improvement and development of integrated water resource management scenarios that take into account the requirements of the EU Water Framework Directive. More on FREEWAT: http://www.freewat.eu/
Ramsar Sites in Ukraine
Ukraine is a contracting party (member state) of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance especially as Waterfowl Habitat, and there are 39 sites in its territory placed onto the List of Wetlands of International Importance. In cooperation with the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine, we are working on actualization of geodata and update cartographic materials for existing and perspective wetlands of international importance in accordance with the requirements of the Ramsar Convention Secretariat. More on wetlands of international impotance in Ukraine on the Ramsar Sites Information Service website: https://rsis.ramsar.org/ris-search/?solrsort=officialname_ssort%20asc&f%5B0%5D=regionCountry_en_ss%3AEurope&f%5B1%5D=regionCountry_en_ss%3AUkraine&pagetab=1
Protected Areas of Ukraine
Despite the goals and requirements of national and international environmental policy and legislation, Ukraine does not have a single, reliable and publicly available tidy geodata source of current importance on protected areas. This significantly complicates their protection, monitoring, management, and research. Understanding importance of the issue, we have joined a civil crowdsource project, initiated in 2014 by the specialists and activists in the areas of nature conservation, geoinformatics, and open data. The project is aimed at the mapping of the boundaries of protected areas of Ukraine in the OpenStreetMap and development of the derivative open geodata on this basis. The procedure of mapping pays a special attention to the protected areas of local importance which make up over 90% of total quantity and about 50% of total area of all protected areas in Ukraine. The web-service of the project http://opengeo.intetics.com.ua/osm/pa/
Also we published the following books on open source geospatial software:
Bruy, A., & Svidzinska, D. (2015). QGIS By Example. Birmingham – Mumbai: Packt Publishing.
Svidzinska, D. (2014). Methods Of Geoecological Research: A Geoinformational Practicum Based On the Open Source GIS SAGA. Kyiv: Logos. (in Ukrainian)
