The UNIGIS International Association (UIA) would like to announce the winners of its Academic Excellence Prize. The Prize, initiated in 2008, is presented to the student, or students, who submits the best MSc thesis (or paper) during the academic year and are nominated by their UNIGIS sites.
In this year’s competition six excellent, high-quality MSc theses were considered by the Review Panel. The panel decided to propose three awards, including two winners of the Academic Excellence Prize for 2018:
– Carrie Elizabeth Steves (UNIGIS USA; thesis “Trends in the Alaskan Bottom-Trawl Fishery from 1993 – 2015: A GIS-based Spatiotemporal Analysis”) who used various data sets and spatial analysis to assess intensity of fishing activities around the coast of Alaska, and their impact on marine ecosystems, and
– Paul Gosling (UNIGIS Manchester; thesis “Automated Map Projection Selection for GIS”), who developed a new tool for ArcGIS recommending most suitable projections for mapping and analysis, based on an in-depth consideration of projection distortions and their measures.
Christoph Giger (UNIGIS Salzburg, thesis “Assessing Shrub and Tree Encroachment in Alpine Pastures from Airborne Laser Scanning Data”) was awarded the third place. In his thesis he presented a methodology to assess shrub and tree encroachment on abandoned agricultural areas in Switzerland using time series of airborne laser scanning data.
The Review Panel would like to commend these individuals and the three other theses for the high quality of the work.