Brief History

The history of the Department of Geography in Zhejiang University goes back to the Department of History and Geography, founded in 1936 by the eminent president of the University, Professor Chu Kochen. The founding head of this department was late Professor ZHANG Qiyun, a former student of President Chu Kochen. Professor Zhang was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Acta Geographia Sinica and later he established the Chinese Culture University in Taiwan. Over the past 82 years, this department has experienced various ups and downs, and has been reestablished as Department of Geography within the School of Earth Sciences since 2016. 

Research Area

The research carried out in the Department of Geography is focused mainly in four major fields:

    Geographic Information Science (GIS)

This division aims to enhance the theories and methods of geographic information science and better understand the mutual influence of human, land, and environment. Major research areas include high-performance management and mining analysis of spatiotemporal big data, spatiotemporal statistics, reasoning and prediction, GeoAI and smart cities, smart oceans, remote sensing processing and AI, comprehensive observation and evolution analysis on global land use/cover, urbanization and resilience analysis. The Zhejiang Provincial Key Lab of GIS is affiliated with this division.

    Remote Sensing

This team is aiming to discover the lithosphere and its role in mineralization and supplying fossil energy, explore the near-surface process associated with human activities, achieve scientific management of the land, and reduce the natural hazards by dynamically mapping the surface variation with multi-source data. Major research areas include remote sensing image analysis, computer vision, machine learning, geographical exploration & information technologies and remote sensing in geology.

    Physical Geography

The physical geography has done intensive studies on various topics in the field of physical geography including geomorphology, biogeography, ecology, etc. Field studies have been conducted in the drylands of northern China over the last decades, aiming to better understand the interactions between climate change, landscape evolution, surface processes and tectonics in the Earth surface system. Climate variation and landscape evolution since Pleistocene in Chinese deserts and in other regions including Zhejiang Province are investigated with great details via analyzing landscape and sediments, supported by numerical simulation and remote sensing.

    Human and Economic Geography and Urban Planning

This team focuses on the area of human geography, economic geography, historical geography combined with aspects of physical geography. Specific research area includes land use and planning, analysis of high tech industries and firm innovation.