Venue: University of Birmingham

Workshop: Cosmic overdensities through cosmic time

Talk Abstract: The next generation of large scale photometric surveys, such as the Dark Energy Survey and Euclid, provide the opportunity to study galaxy environment not only as a function of galaxy properties but also as a function of redshift. The DES will map 300 million galaxies over 5,000 deg^2. This enormous dataset comes at the cost of redshift precision. In preparation we have studied the impact of redshift precision on galaxy environment using data from the SDSS. We found that even at large redshift uncertainties (~0.1) there was a significant correlation between environment measurements and a set of spectroscopic benchmark measurements leading to the conclusion that it should be possible to make robust measurements of galaxy environment in photometric surveys. We are currently analysing the DES science verification data (~100 squared degrees), examining the evolution of galaxy properties with galaxy environment through cosmic time since z~1.