Sponsored Research

The CGA leads and co-leads sponsored research projects that blend spatial thinking, data infrastructure, and domain-focused inquiry, to address challenges across the various domains of climate, migration, health, ecosystems, and historical mapping.

Current and recent work creation of development of, and participation in, a virtual center for spatiotemporal research (Spatiotemporal Innovation Center), predictive analytics for climate-induced migration (CLIMB), large-scale environmental mapping (e.g. mangroves), COVID-19 mortality impact modeling, real-time pandemic response platforms, GPU-enabled geospatial analysis, ecosystem composition via imaging spectrometry, and digital humanities efforts such as the Temporal Gazetteer and China Historical GIS.

These projects illustrate CGA’s capacity to design and build platforms, apply spatial methods to topical domains, and support collaborative scholarship.

Spectrometry-derived Ecosystem Composition

Moorcroft Lab Recent technological advances in remote sensing are moving terrestrial ecosystem monitoring beyond land cover change mapping, in the form of imaging spectrometry able to detect light intensity from tens to hundreds of contiguous spectral...

Out of Eden Walk

The Out of Eden Walk is a 24,000-mile journalistic endeavor to create a global record of human life at the start of a new millennium as told by villagers, nomads, traders, farmers, soldiers, and artists who rarely make the news. Sponsored and hosted by...

OmniSci (formerly MapD) - explore the power of GPUs in spatiotemporal analytics

Funded by OmniSci Technologies, LLC. as a member of the I/UCRC Spatiotemporal Innovation Center Can be hosted on Harvard Cannon Cluster, Amazon AWS, Mass Open Cloud, MapD Cloud. Use cases: Improving access to hydrological models used in water management...

The Billion Object Platform (BOP)

With funding from the Sloan Foundation and Harvard Dataverse , Ben Lewis, Devika Kakkar, Merce Crosas, and David Smiley developed a prototype, open source, spatio-temporal visualization platform dubbed "the BOP" (Billion Object Platform). The first goal...

Temporal Gazetteer

TGAZ Search Engine and API The Temporal Gazetteer (TGAZ) is a search engine and machine-readable API for historical placenames. Built upon toponymic databases of historical placenames from the China Historical GIS, the Toponimika - Historical Gazetteer of...

G. W. Skinner Regional Systems Analysis

An archive of the datasets developed for the Regional Systems Analysis laboratory, under the direction of G. William Skinner. The core datasets, including GIS layers and tabular data, are being preserved in a repository on DataVerse. The archived...