The GeoInformatics Laboratory (GIL) acts as a focus for research into geoinformatics across the School of Earth Environment and Society (SEES) and other disciplines at the University. Geoinformatics involves a range of different synergetic activities including the collection, processing, analysis and visualization of spatial data sets. This emphasis on multidisciplinary approaches creates a strong focus on different application areas including environmental problem-solving, human-environment interactions, collaborative spatial decision-making, and other cross-disciplinary approaches that use applications of geographic information science (GIScience) and remote sensing.

Examples of the areas of study of our team of researchers features a strong focus on geomorphometric analysis and digital terrain representation, modeling landslide processes under undisturbed and disturbed conditions, computational approaches for understanding potential avian impact from offshore wind farms, predicting invasive species in wetland environment and other remote sensing land use approaches aimed at inventory, monitoring and modeling of conditions. The most current research projects underway are in the area of web-based GIS, such as collaborative spatial decision support systems (C-SDSSs), public participatory GIS (PPGIS), volunteered geographic information (VGI), and 3D geo-information derived from laser scanning techniques.