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Although originally developed for military purposes, Global Navigation Satellite Systems have become indispensable for an ever-growing range of civil and scientific applications such as cartography, cadastral and land information systems, transport systems, precision agriculture, self-driving vehicles, rescue missions, etc. The accuracy of positioning by means of GNSS, however, is affected by atmospheric distortions of the GNSS signals as well as by the characteristics of the receiver (e.g. number of channels, fir...

As a consequence of climate change, in some regions, more intense rain showers go hand in hand with longer dry periods. The subsequent more and more severe droughts can have devastating effects on many economic and social sectors. Therefore, it is necessary to be able to predict and assess the consequences of these droughts on a local scale, in order to develop policies to cope. Drought assessment needs a lot of detailed and accurate input-data, such as land use, land cover, soil moisture, vegetation, evapotranspi...

Two commonly used programming languages in geosciences are R and Python. Both languages come with inherent advantages and disadvantages. While Python is a general-purpose language with a readable syntax, R is built by statisticians and encompasses their specific language. In contrast with more nominative and static programming languages, like C++ or Java, both R and Python are heavily used in non-informatics disciplines, due to their relative ease of use. Notwithstanding the lower performance of both languages com...

The European Directive 2009/28/EC - promoting the use of renewable energy - creates a common set of rules for the use of renewable energy in the EU. The goal is to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by setting national binding targets for all EU countries with the overall aim of making renewable energy sources account for 20% of the total EU energy needs by 2020. Within this context, the Flemish government wants to stimulate its citizens and its companies to make the transition to the production and use of renew...

Worldwide, flooding causes more damage than any other natural hazard. The growing extensive flood risk has a large impact on the present and future economy, especially in developing countries, which have limited funds for prevention and mitigation measures. Moreover, the allocation of these funds is often done without sufficient and adequate information on high-risk and flood-prone areas, since the acquisition of flood data is very expensive as well. Therefore, this research focuses on a low-cost methodology to cr...