Ionel HAIDU
Fields of interest/specialization: Technical Geography, Time Series Analysis, Climatology, Hydrology
Educated at Babeș-Bolyai University, where he obtained his bachelor’s degree in 1980, Ionel Haidu earned a PhD in Geography from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași in 1991. He rose through the academic ranks to become a full professor in 2003 and served as a doctoral supervisor from 2004 to 2020 in Technical Geography and GIS, a field newly established in Cluj-Napoca. In Romania, he also worked at the Faculty of Hydrotechnics of the Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest (1995–1999) and the Faculty of Geography of the University of Oradea (1999–2003). Between 2001 and 2009, he was invited on three occasions to serve as a visiting professor at the Faculty of Geography of the University of Strasbourg. He subsequently served as a tenured professor at Université de Lorraine until 2026, teaching courses in climatology, hydrology, natural hazards and climate change. He has led or participated in numerous national and international projects, including those on hydroclimatic risks in the Bihor cross-border area (2000–2001), the analysis of climate change over the last millennium (2006–2008), the vulnerability of mountain settlements to torrential flows (2007–2011), and the European FOREST@RISK programme (2018–2022). In academic publishing, he is the founder and editor of Geographia Technica (since 2006), now one of the most visible international journals of technical geography in south-eastern Europe, indexed in Web of Science and Scopus. He has published more than 160 scientific articles, many in prestigious journals such as Environmental Pollution, Journal of Hydrology, Remote Sensing and Earth System Science Data. His notable achievements include contributions to assessing the vulnerability of water resources in the context of climate change and to developing spatially explicit databases covering Europe. In 2026, as first author, he published Atlas of Romania’s Main Climatic Parameters. Recent Changes, 1961–2020, and Projections for 2021–2050 (the first climate atlas of Romania to be published in 60 years). He is a member of prestigious international scientific organisations (AGU, EGU, IAHS and AIC), serves as an evaluator and expert for CNATDCU, CNCS and ANC, and was awarded the Romanian Academy’s Simion Mehedinți Prize in 1995. Through his work, Ionel Haidu has helped consolidate technical geography as a discipline at the interface between environmental sciences and modern digital tools, with international recognition reflected in his extensive academic collaborations and the impact of his publications.
Curriculum Vitae: Ionel Haidu CV
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=yZsvmj0AAAAJ
Representative works:
Haidu, I., Magyari-Sáska, Z., Ionac, N., & Irașoc, A. (2026). Atlas of Romania’s Main Climatic Parameters: Recent Changes, 1961–2020, and Projections for 2021–2050 [Special issue]. Geographia Technica, 21(4), A3 format, 135 pp, https://doi.org/10.21163/GT_2026.214
Haidu, I., Magyari-Sáska, Z., & Magyari-Sáska, A. (2025). Spatio-Temporal Gap Filling of Sentinel-2 NDI45 Data Using a Variance-Weighted Kalman Filter and LSTM Ensemble. Sensors, 25(17), 5299, https://doi.org/10.3390/s25175299
Haidu I., El Orfi T., Magyari-Sáska Z., Lebaut S., El Gachi M. (2024), Modeling the Long-Term Variability in the Surfaces of Three Lakes in Morocco with Limited Remote Sensing Image Sources. Remote Sensing, 16 (17), 3133. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs16173133
Forzieri, G., Pecchi, M., Girardello, M., Mauri, A., Klaus, M., Nikolov, C., Rüetschi, M., Gardiner, B., Tomaštík, J., Small, D., Nistor, C., Jonikavicius, D., Spinoni, J., Feyen, L., Giannetti, F., Comino, R., Wolynski, A., Pirotti, F., Maistrelli, F., Savulescu, I., Wurpillot-Lucas, S., Karlsson, S., Zieba-Kulawik, K., Strejczek-Jazwinska, P., Mokroš, M., Franz, S., Krejci, L., Haidu, I., Nilsson, M., Wezyk, P., Catani, F., Chen, Y.-Y., Luyssaert, S., Chirici, G., Cescatti, A. and Beck, P.S.A. (2020), A spatially explicit database of wind disturbances in European forests over the period 2000–2018. Earth System Science Data, 12(1): 257–276. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-257-2020
Haidu I., Nistor M-M. (2020), Long‐term effect of climate change on groundwater recharge in the Grand Est region of France. Meteorological Applications, 27(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/met.1796
Haidu I., Furtuna P.R., Lebaut S. (2019), Detection of old scattered windthrow using low-cost resources. The case of Storm Xynthia in the Vosges Mountains, 28 February 2010. Open Geosciences, 11(1), 492-504. https://doi.org/10.1515/geo-2019-0040