The unit's scientific field is environmental geography. Thanks to its expertise in human geography, physical geography and geomatics, LETG's scientific program aims to contribute to knowledge on nature/society interactions through a modeling and integrating approach at the geographical interfaces between land, sea and atmosphere.

Over the course of successive contracts, scientific results have been acquired on various issues within this vast field, thanks to a spatial and spatio-temporal approach. Our mastery of geographic methods and tools, strongly impacted by the “digital turn” initiated by our societies in the 1990s, and our long-standing field expertise in a variety of environments, have enabled us to join several research groups and play an active part in the gradual implementation of a broad, multi-faceted interdisciplinary approach involving not only other disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, but also the Universe Sciences, Life Sciences, and Information and Communications Sciences.

The LETG project is fully in line with the INEE-CNRS scientific outlook, focusing on several research priorities of societal interest relating to the functioning and evolution of coastal and continental systems in the face of different types of dynamics, whether the consequences of climatic hazards on bio- and abiotic environments and on man and his activities, changes in uses and practices and their interactions with resources, or the contribution of new systems to environmental governance.

A wide range of spatial scales (from local to global) and temporal scales (from the real time of certain localized data, to the Holocene for the consideration of long-term changes, and to the future through prospective scenarization) are mobilized in the scientific themes, drawing on the various contributions of digital processing of geographic information (image processing, spatial analysis, modeling-simulation).

The threefold systemic/spatial/temporal approach is based on modeling and prospective approaches, implementing methods and tools for data acquisition, analysis, representation and dissemination, which are the subject of reflexive and critical analyses of their effective contribution to societal issues in the digital humanities current.

Our investigations focus on two key areas, facing a range of issues linked directly or indirectly to the multi-scalar consequences of global climatic and socio-economic changes: the coastline (sea and coastal watersheds) and continental environments. The experiments carried out, which take advantage of digital innovations, feed a reflexive and critical approach to concepts and methods, in tune with public action. This observation has justified the organization of our scientific program into 3 axes