Are you motivated by the critical yet complex challenge of developing a spatiotemporal data infrastructure that integrates human-subject, behavioural, and environmental data to support
human action-taking in complex land systems? If yes, this
postdoc position at
Wageningen University is just right for you!
The Geo-information Science team within the Laboratory of Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing is an interdisciplinary research group focused on integrated approaches to geospatial systems analysis. We apply a complex adaptive systems approach that explicitly emphasizes behavioural models of human action-taking and decision-making. Relying on geo-information science as the foundation of our research, we employ participatory methods and integrate qualitative and quantitative information to analyse the dynamic interactions within complex land systems. The resulting knowledge informs the development of models to advance our understanding of land use and land cover changes in space and time. We integrate local perspectives with regional and global contexts to gain a deeper understanding of human-environment interactions. Understanding and shaping land systems is a challenging undertaking. Land systems emerge from complex interactions among human behaviour, environmental processes, and socio-economic drivers, all of which vary across spatial and temporal dimensions. Bringing together diverse data, information, and knowledge—collected from survey data, narrative accounts, and participatory insights to sensor measurements and high-resolution geospatial data—is an essential prerequisite for studying these complex interactions.
This Postdoc position focuses on problems related to varying disciplinary perspectives, heterogeneous data formats, and mismatched spatiotemporal resolutions, which together create significant challenges for data integration. To date, Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) have provided the policies, standards, and technologies to share, and reuse of conventional geospatial data. However, most existing SDIs do not adequately support the
integration of behavioural or human-centred data. Such data necessitates stricter regulations for privacy protection and ethical constraints, particularly when combined with location information or other sensitive data that could identify individuals. They also pose challenges in contextualization, as human behaviour is often deeply influenced by cultural, social, psychological, and situational factors. Yet behavioural and human-centred data are crucial to understanding complex land systems. Therefore, this project aims to expand the concept of SDIs to Socio-Environmental SDIs (or SE-SDIs). We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher to develop and demonstrate a conceptual SDI model for integrating multi-sourced, multi-modal data into a coherent data infrastructure and define the appropriate policies and standards for hosting, managing, and sharing the data typically used for analyses of complex adaptive land systems.
Your duties and responsibilities include: - Develop and test a conceptual SDI model for integrating heterogeneous (conventional geospatial, environmental, behavioural, and human-centred) datasets, including qualitative and quantitative data, across spatial and temporal dimensions;
- define and specify metadata standards, policies, and documentation practices that support the responsible use and reuse of behavioural and human-centred data within SE-SDIs;
- collaborate with group members to align the data infrastructure with broader research goals;
- test and evaluate the developed SE-SDI model using real-world case studies and contribute to scientific publications.
Your teamYou will collaborate with GRS colleagues who have expertise in methods and tools for spatiotemporal analysis of complex land systems (including agent-based modelling), spatial data infrastructure systems and strategies, participatory serious gaming, and immersive technologies, as well as their applications in human-space interaction.