List of Submitted Hacks

List of Submitted Hacks#

This page indexes the community contributions to the Sustainability Transformation HaCLAthon.

Status: Open for Submission 🚀#

The HaCLAthon is currently in the submission phase. Once the first Pull Requests are reviewed and merged, the resulting notebooks and workflows will be listed here.

Are you participating? Check the Quick-Start Guide to learn how to add your work to this list.

Upcoming Contributions#

  • Topic: Digital Landscape Traces Interactive Colab Jupyter - Alexander Dunkel (IOER) & Dominik WeckmĂĽller (TU Dresden) To support transformative governance and planning, this interactive chapter will explore a privacy-safe dataset of 66 million social media posts (Dunkel and Nieswand 2025) published in the ioerDATA to map patterns of visitor frequentation for selected regions and areas in Germany (see Dunkel et al. 2025). Responding to direct feedback from planning offices and stakeholders, the notebook will provide an accessible approach to filter, subset, and visualize digital attention in physical spaces. The goal is to help planners identify spatial pressures and inform sustainable regional development.

  • Topic: Automatic delineation of inner zone (§ 34 BauGB) Tutorial - Oliver Harig
    IBTool is an open-source QGIS plugin that automatically derives settlement boundaries from building footprints and street networks (see Harig et al. 2021). It replaces manually digitised or administratively defined delineations with a consistent, data-driven delineation of the inner zone (§ 34 BauGB). Practical applications include settlement-area monitoring, assessing infill-development potential, and documenting land consumption — scalable from the municipal to the nationwide level. A recent expert evaluation (Eichhorn et al. 2025) found IBTool’s delineations more precise and consistent than comparable products such as ATKIS®-Ortslage and GHSL, with notably less over-detection at settlement edges. The contribution is a hands-on chapter on installing, feeding and parameterising the three plugins involved — IBTool, Data Wizard for ATKIS data preparation, and Partitioning — all open source under GPL-2.0-or-later. No programming knowledge is required: participants run the tool on their own region, then pick a track — building filter, parameters, partitioning, data preparation for a further federal state, or the delineation algorithm itself — and document their findings as GitHub issues.

  • Topic: From Footprints to Building Stock Insights: A Spatial Decision-Support Pipeline for Sustainable Transformation Interactive Colab Jupyter - Markus MĂĽnzinger; Martin Behnisch (IOER) Transforming nationwide building data into comparable building stock characteristics is a prerequisite for evidence-based decision-making. We have developed a spatial decision-support pipeline that leverages an enriched nationwide dataset (see MĂĽnzinger 2026) of building footprints with existing geometric attributes, including volume and roof area, and aggregates this information to municipal associations across Germany. By combining these data with a spatial typology of settlement structures along the urban–rural continuum, the pipeline enables meaningful comparisons between structurally similar municipalities and supports analyses of how building stock characteristics are distributed across regions. Using approaches such as Lorenz curves, we explore the concentration of resources and identify structural patterns that can inform targeted applications. The HaCLAthon provides an opportunity to address the “So What?”: how can these structural building stock characteristics be connected to concrete sustainability challenges? We invite contributors to explore, adapt, and extend the pipeline to identify and extract meaningful patterns and link them to applications in areas such as the circular economy, the energy transition, and urban resilience.

  • [Topic: Story Map Hidden Herons in Urban Spaces] Story - Gongmingyue Tang (IOER) To support biodiversity-sensitive urban planning and knowledge transfer, this interactive StoryMap will use herons as a narrative lens to connect bird occurrence data with urban spatial datasets from IOER Monitor and ioerDATA. The chapter will introduce selected heron species in Germany and explore how water bodies, impervious surfaces, and urban tree canopy may provide and shape hidden habitats within cities. With a particular focus on the Canopy Height Model, the project will translate spatial data into an accessible map-led story about urban biodiversity, green infrastructure, and ecological niches. The chapter will demonstrate the process of turning selected spatial datasets into a data story, from choosing and linking relevant data layers to shaping them into an accessible narrative for public communication.

  • [Topic: Urban Green Cooling Benifits with ioerDATA] - Marzan Tasnim Oyshi (IOER) This hack develops a reproducible and interactive Jupyter Book workflow using the ioerDATA replication package Climate Regulation in Cities to explore urban green infrastructure and climate regulation ecosystem services. The project guides users through accessing data via the Dataverse API, exploring replication packages and spatial metadata, performing geospatial analyses, and creating publication-quality maps. In addition to the standard training workflow, we develop a gamified learning experience based on interactive missions and challenges that support self-paced learning and reproducible research practices. The project follows a Learn → Run → Extend approach and aims to support students, researchers, and practitioners interested in urban climate adaptation, open science, and spatial data analysis

  • [Topic: Insights on urban development and sustainable mobility infrastructure across geographical scales] - Sujit Kumar Sikder (IOER) Sukanto Das (ZALF) We explore multi-level spatial insights into urban development and sustainable urban mobility across geographical scales. We adopt curated data from global open data sources and established indicator systems, applying comparative statistical analysis across continents to identify spatial patterns, disparities, and development trajectories. A data-harvesting workflow is demonstrated following reproducibility principles using R and Python, integrating statistical analysis, geospatial processing, and visualization. At the lowest possible spatial resolution, urban grid-level mobility indicators derived from open datasets are integrated to investigate the spatio-temporal dynamics of local public transit infrastructure and services across places in Germany. The workflow demonstrates how heterogeneous FAIR and open spatial data can be integrated and analysed to support evidence-based understanding of converging challenges related to climate change and decarbonization, while motivating pathways towards sustainability transformation through technological innovation, open science, and datafication. Further research remains open to exploring qualitative dimensions at different spatial scales and places.

  • [Topic: Circularity] - Team Name / Author (Coming Soon)

References#

[1]

Alexander Dunkel and Maria Nieswand. Replication package for: Digital Landscape Traces - Locals and Tourists in Germany Map. 2025. URL: https://doi.org/10.71830/VDMUWW, doi:10.71830/VDMUWW.

[2]

Alexander Dunkel, C. Schmidt, W. Wende, and M. Nieswand. Digitale Spuren in der Landschaft: Ein neuer Blick auf Deutschlands Naturräume durch Soziale Medien. Landschaft und Natur in Karten. Naturschutz und Landschaftsplanung, 2025. doi:10.1399/NuL.190572.

[3]

Oliver Harig, Robert Hecht, Dirk Burghardt, and Gotthard Meinel. Automatic delineation of urban growth boundaries based on topographic data using germany as a case study. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 2021. URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/10/5/353, doi:10.3390/ijgi10050353.

[4]

Sebastian Eichhorn, Oliver Harig, Stefan Siedentop, and Robert Hecht. Assessing the suitability of settlement delineations for monitoring infilling: a web- and gis-based expert evaluation approach. Environment and Planning B, 52(7):1735–1755, September 2025. URL: https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/envirb/v52y2025i7p1735-1755.html, doi:10.1177/23998083241308407.

[5]

Markus MĂĽnzinger. 3D Building Metrics Germany 2024. 2026. URL: https://doi.org/10.71830/9CBBWV, doi:10.71830/9CBBWV.

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