Sérgio Souza Costa
Principal Investigator of the LambdaGeo research group · Associate Professor, Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA)
| Position | Associate Professor, Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA) |
| Research group | LambdaGeo — Principal Investigator (CNPq record) |
| Graduate programs | PPGC&TAmb/UFMA — permanent faculty member PROFCOMP/UFMA — Professional Master's in Computing Education (national network coordinated by SBC) |
| Education | MSc and PhD in Applied Computing, National Institute for Space Research (INPE), PhD 2012 |
| Location | São Luís, Maranhão, Brazil |
| Contact | sergio.costa@ufma.br · group: lambdageo@ufma.br |
About
Sérgio Souza Costa is an Associate Professor at the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA), where he leads the LambdaGeo research group and is a permanent faculty member of the Graduate Program in Environmental Science and Technology (PPGC&TAmb). He also teaches and supervises in PROFCOMP, the national Professional Master’s in Computing Education coordinated by the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC), which trains basic-education teachers to work with computational thinking and digital culture in schools. His research develops computational methods for understanding environmental change: spatially explicit models of land use and land cover change, deforestation and coastal impacts in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado, and the open, reproducible software and data infrastructure these models depend on.
He holds MSc and PhD degrees in Applied Computing from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), where his doctoral work addressed regional-scale agent-based modelling of land change in Amazonian frontier areas and he contributed to the TerraME/LuccME modelling platforms.
Research interests
- Land use and land cover change (LUCC) modelling
- Dynamic spatial modelling: cellular automata and agent-based models
- Environmental impacts: deforestation, sea-level rise, coastal ecosystems
- Reproducible and FAIR scientific software
- Linked Data and semantic geoinformatics
- Functional programming for scientific modelling
Current projects
- DisSModel — Python framework for discrete spatial simulation and land-change modelling, successor to INPE’s TerraME/LuccME (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23246106).
- Land change in Maranhão — deforestation in the Maranhão Cerrado and land-cover classification accuracy in the São Luís region, with open code for each study.
- QGISSPARQL — integration of Linked Data and GIS (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23102044).
- Open textbooks — geoprocessing, remote sensing and geospatial modelling with Python (lambdageo-edu).
Selected publications
- Correia, L. F. C. S.; Rocha, T. V. S. M.; Bezerra, D. S.; Silva Junior, C. H. L.; Costa, S. S. Expansão do desmatamento no Cerrado maranhense entre 2001 e 2023. Revista Tocantinense de Geografia, 2026. DOI
- Rocha, T. V. S. M.; Costa, S. S.; Correia, L. F. C. S.; Bezerra, D. S. Avaliação da acurácia na classificação de uso e cobertura da terra: um estudo de caso na região intermediária de São Luís com o MapBiomas. Revista GeoNordeste, 2025. DOI
- Bezerra, D. S.; Costa, S. S. et al. The Amazon COP and the Need for Integration between the Environmental and Climate Agendas. Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências, 2025. DOI
- Bezerra, D. S.; Costa, S. S. et al. Spatially Explicit Modeling for Impacts of Sea-Level Rise in the Baixada Maranhense, Brazilian Legal Amazon. IntechOpen, 2025. DOI
- Moreira, E.; Costa, S. S.; Aguiar, A. P.; Câmara, G.; Carneiro, T. Dynamical coupling of multiscale land change models. Landscape Ecology, 2009. DOI
Supervision
Supervises undergraduate research (PIBIC/PIBITI) and master’s students in the Graduate Program in Environmental Science and Technology and in the Professional Master’s in Computing Education (PROFCOMP) — see people and mentorship. Prospective students interested in environmental modelling, GIS and reproducible research software can write to lambdageo@ufma.br.