Are you motivated by the critical yet complex challenge of developing a spatiotemporal data integration framework 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. Our work applies 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 endeavours, 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 conceptual and simulation models to help further our understanding of land use and land cover changes in space and time. Our research centres on integrating 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. Varying disciplinary perspectives, data formats, and spatiotemporal resolutions create significant challenges for data integration.
While Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) provide policies, standards, and technologies to host, manage, share, and regulate the use of geospatial data, they typically do not consider the integration of behavioural or human-centred data. These data necessitate stricter regulation for privacy protection, particularly when combined with location information or other sensitive data that could lead to the identification of individuals. They also pose challenges in contextualization, as human behaviour is often deeply influenced by cultural, social, and situational factors. Yet, behavioural and human-centred data are crucial to understanding complex land systems. Hence, we aim to expand the concept of SDIs to Socio-Environmental SDIs (or SE-SDIs).
We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher to develop an innovative SE-SDI that will serve as the foundation for addressing key challenges in complex land systems research. As a postdoctoral researcher, you will work on synthesizing multi-source, 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 a robust methodological framework for integrating heterogeneous datasets -including qualitative and quantitative data - across spatial and temporal dimensions,
- define and specify metadata standards and policies for documenting and sharing data,
- collaborate with group members to align the data infrastructure with broader research goals,
- apply and evaluate the developed SE-SDI framework using real-world case studies.