Cover picture: Aurélie Noel

My name is Aurélie, I am a team leader for the expertise of geospatial systems at the faculty of bioeconomy. One of our team objectives is to develop awareness and competence about geographic information and that is why the Novia Spatial Competence Centre is being developed.

While most of the work is desktop-based, sitting in the comfort of our office chair, spatial information also means being in the field, sensing the environment, gauging the surroundings. The SCC benefits from its special status of being at the crossings of the various fields of bioeconomy notably green ecosystems or local economy, and leveraging this quality, we get to participate in fieldwork, and experience space in another way than through a computer screen.   

This autumn, the SCC participated in the Nature Grazing Seminar and got to visit the Fiskars farm to get acquainted with the cows of Bovik organic farm, grazing freely on natural pastures. Being on the ground and meeting with the cattle gives a very different perspective of resilience that comes with biodiversity than land use calculated area or statistics on grazing efficiency towards environmental protection.

Picture: Aurélie Noel

A couple of weeks later, the SCC tagged along to design the future nature trail in Ingå. Boots on, drone in the bag and tea in a thermos, getting ready to track our steps towards the making of a new walking path for others to enjoy soon. This time, the biodiversity we encountered was in the air with a white-tailed eagle family and felt to our core with hugging a moss-covered granite boulder.     

Picture: Anna-Karin Almén

Experiencing the same space virtually and physically got us to wonder, and keeps on challenging our worldview. You can decide to experience a space, whether it is a natural pasture or a forest, as a traditional natural scientist and map it in an immutable and objective way. Or to feel the space as each of its components, to observe the intertwined relationships at play, to make it your own familiar place after leaving your trace, your trail and your memories and share it in a much more personal way. And those would give two totally different representations of the same space. Those reflections led the way to our presentation at the IGU conference Mediated geographies: Exploring the dynamic nexus of media, environment, and place, that concluded on “there are as many map of a space as there are people experiencing that space” - check it out: maps as media for open representation of perception and let us know what you think: scc@novia.fi

The blogpost has been reviewed by Novia's editorial board and accepted for publication on 18.11.2024.