The 4-hour seminar focuses on state-of-the-art remote sensing methods to address questions of land cover and land use change at the regional level. A special emphasis is given to approaches that 1) capture seasonal land surface dynamics associated with land management as well as extreme weather events using dense optical time series, 2) describe land cover as discrete categories and continuous fractions, and 3) map historic land cover/use change for the past three decades.
During week 1-4 of the semester students are introduced to data sources, data processing, and mapping approaches using remote sensing tools (EnMAP-Box, Python) and cloud computing (Google Earth Engine). This way the methodological basis from MSc5.1 Earth Observation is extended.
During the course students will develop group projects for further data analysis along research questions in the context of regional land use dynamics such as agricultural changes and forest disturbances. The project work will encompass field work including self-organized land use assessments. Ideally, project work is organized near the context(s) of ongoing research projects. The progress in student work is presented three times during the semester, with 20 minute presentations on ideas and concepts (week 5), progress and first results (week 12) and results, outcomes and remaining steps (week 16). |
