Wochenübersicht

  • Research Colloquium of the Earth Observation and Conservation Biogeography Labs

    This colloquium provides space for presenting ongoing research of PhD students, PostDocs, as well as visiting researchers of the Earth Observation and Conservation Biogeography Labs.

    Subscribe with your calendar app:

    https://kal.hu-berlin.de/SOGo/dav/public/pflugmad/Calendar/7C95-6127E800-8A9-27F1FDC0.ics

    Guidelines for participants:

    All participants joining the colloquium via zoom will be muted and video stream will be disabled to avoid unnecessary data transmission and audio problems. Questions of understanding will be answered after the presentation, followed by a discussion. Participants should announce if they want to pose a question of understanding or bring up a discussion item by using the chat functionality of zoom. Type QU for questions of understanding or DI for discussion item in the chat. Based on this list, the session chair will call participants and enable their microphones.

    Guidelines for presenters (PhD candidates, Postdocs, and visiting scholars):

    Presentations should be 20-25 minutes to leave ample time for discussion. Please test your audio and video configuration before the colloquium starts. This includes testing your microphone, speakers, and screen sharing functionality. Please disable any software which generates internet traffic, including messengers (e.g. Skype) and cloud storage sync (e.g. DropBox, OneDrive). We will open the meeting room for presenters at 14.00h sharp in order to test the technical setup.

    If you would like to give a talk at the colloquium:

    Please write an email to dirk.pflugmacher@geo.hu-berlin.de and include the following information

    (1) preferred date
    (2) title of your presentation
    (3) your affiliation
    (4) a short abstract (100-150 words)

  • 8 November 2022

    Prioritizing conservation action in Catalonia (Spain): How to optimize conservation efforts through systematic conservation planning approaches

    Mónica Lanzas
    Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia, Spain

    We collected conservation measures implemented in Catalonia in the period 2013-2018. We assess whether these measures cover adequately conservation needs and identify gaps in conservation efforts implemented in Catalonia. We then identified priority areas for filling those gaps, by using the prioriactions R package, which tries to find an optimal combination of management actions to reduce the impact of multiple pressures on multiple species and habitats simultaneously. 

  • 15 November 2022

    Predicting potato diseases in smallholder agricultural areas of Nigeria using remote sensing and climate data

    Esther Shupel Ibrahim
    Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research & Earth Observation Lab

    Crop disease management is crucial for sustainable food production. Although farmers in Nigeria continue to use broad-spectrum fungicides on potato, potato diseases are still on the rise. Implementing an epidemiological early warning strategy for potato has been a common practice since the early 19th century, especially in traditional potato-producing areas. However, epidemiological models are predominantly produced in the context of local knowledge, forecasting incidence in the regions where these strategies are developed; unsurprisingly, they tend to underperform in semi-arid potato-producing areas and tropical highlands. The local context of the disease–weather–site relationship in tropical and subtropical regions has barely been investigated. This paper has investigated the potential of Random Forest classifiers (data-driven) and an Multi-criteria classification model (data- and knowledge-driven) to forecast potato diseases using a set of site and weather variables as inputs for both models for the Jos Plateau region of Nigeria.

  • 22 November 2022

    Spatial patterns of in/equality: Investigating the dynamics of land and water access/use around multipurpose reservoirs in Colombia

    Caroline Salomão
    Federal University of Minas Gerais - UFMG (Brazil)
    IRI THESys

    Hydropower dams can induce some spatial and temporal changes in land and water systems, especially in terms of their access and use. Considering that the main purpose of this type of dams is to produce energy, analyzing these changes through the lenses of the water-energy-food nexus helps us to identify the synergies and trade-offs between these components, which has been long considered separately in the dam literature. These changes could happen in different times (dam's construction and operation, for example), spatial scales and, in some cases, are influenced by national political-economic context. Colombia is moving towards peace agreements in recent years, something that has been showing to impact land use and cover change. Hence, different drivers of land use land cover need to be considered jointly with the other impacts of dams on the environment and communities. Besides this, it's important to understand how land use land cover has been influenced by the dam's processes, especially, the agricultural systems and certain food/energy value chains. This new scenario can create or consolidate some local and national socioeconomics characteristics adding inequalities behind the dam's construction.

  • 6 December 2022

    Earth observation for monitoring agriculture under climate change

    Gohar Ghazaryan
    Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research

    presented by the Colloquium of the Geography Department
    Time: 3pm
    Erwin-Schrödinger-Zentrum (ESZ): Room 0'311

  • 13 December 2022

    Understanding the resilience of land-use actors to social-ecological shocks in deforestation frontiers

    Room: 0'223 (Fläming)

    Sofia Marinaro 
    Biogeography Conservation Lab
    Instituto de Ecología Regional (IER) - CONICET
    CEyACI - FCN e IML

    Tropical deforestation is a key driver of environmental change, with local to global-scale impacts. Therefore, understanding the social-ecological processes underlying deforestation is critically important. A key research gap in this context relates to the impact of shock events, which are relatively frequent but understudied regarding their impact on land-use actors, what determines the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of actors to shocks, and how shocks alter actor networks and land-use decision-making. I will explore these questions for the Argentinian Dry Chaco, an understudied global deforestation hotspot, by specifically (1) identifying and describing key land systems, including key actors; (2) assessing how shocks influence land-use actors’ dependence on, and ability to access to the natural capital; (3) assessing how different shocks affect inter-relationships among actors’ groups and thereby, actors’ decisions; and (4) analyzing land-use actors in terms of factors determining their resilience to shocks.


  • 17 January 2023

    Land use monitoring with remote sensing in the project MonViA (National Monitoring of Biodiversity in Agricultural Landscapes)

    Marcel Schwieder | Thünen Institute

    The occurrence and diversity of insects and other organism groups in agricultural landscapes is influenced by the use and intensity of use of agricultural land. Monitoring biodiversity in agricultural landscapes therefore requires - in addition to knowledge about the distribution and diversity of organism groups - a representative data base on land use and habitat diversity. Deriving such information on a national scale is in the focus of the MonViA monitoring module: Land Use Monitoring - Remote Sensing. In this presentation the general concept and the current state of satellite-based biodiversity indicators (SBI) for long-term monitoring of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes in Germany will be presented.


  • 24 January 2023

    Mennonites and land use change in the Chaco

    Yann le Polain de Waroux | McGill University Montreal

    Short abstract

  • 31 January 2023

    Usable Observations over Europe: optimal aggregation periods for Landsat and Sentinel-2 time series

    Katarzyna Lewińska | Earth Observation Lab

    Landsat and Sentinel-2 data archives provide ever-increasing amounts of satellite data for studying land cover and land use change over the past four decades. However, the availability of cloud-, shadow-, and snow-free observations varies spatially and temporally due to climate and data acquisition schemes. Spatio-temporal heterogeneity poses a major issue for time-series analysis approaches, but can be addressed with pixel-based compositing that generates equidistant cloud-free or near-cloud free synthetic images. Although much consideration is given to methods identifying the ‘best’ pixel value for each composite, determining the aggregation period receives less attention and is often done arbitrary. Here, we evaluated data compositing windows ranging from 5-day to one year for 1984-2021 Landsat and 2015-2021 Sentinel 2 time series across Europe. We considered separate and joint use of both data archives and analyzed spation-temporal availability of composites during a calendar year and pixel‑specific growing season. Our results highlighted low data coverage in the 1980s, 1990s, and in 2012, as well as spatial variability driven by climate and orbit overlaps, which altogether throttles compositing windows for medium- and long-term analyses. We demonstrated that prior to 2011 monthly composites ensured overall only 50-62% data coverage for each calendar year, and ~75% afterwards, with further increase to ~82% when Landsat and Sentinel-2 were combined. Concurrently, 10-day composites provided only 25-32%, ~50% and ~73% data coverage for the respective time windows and datasets. Overall, our assessment of data availability over Europe showed challenges for time series analyses based on composites and provided robust recommendations for selecting optimal aggregation windows for composite-based studies.

  • 14 February 2023

    Multi- / Super- / Hyper-spectral - remote sensing prospects towards the end of the decade

    Patrick Hostert / Akpona Okujeni  | EOLab

    We build much of our research on ever-increasing satellite archives, such as Landsat or Sentinel-2. Next to multidecadal data, temporal resolution is core to disentangle, e.g., diverse vegetation phenologies and understand change processes. With the advent of hyperspectral missions such as PRISMA and EnMAP, the spectral dimension gets into focus again. Opportunities arise to tackle specific vegetation traits and to differentiate properties of the Earth surface that were not separable before. With the future ESA mission CHIME and NASA's SBG, operational hyperspectral mission shall monitor the Earth in a similar fashion as previously only multispectral missions did - hopefully offering the convergence of long and temporally dense multispectral archives on the one hand and new hyperspectral opportunities on the other hand.
    At the same time, follow-up missions such as Landsat Next and Sentinel-2 NG (Next Generation) will create superspectral data, providing some capabilities of hyperspectral satellite data and linking to the legacy of long-term Earth observation missions.  We will here provide first insights and compare ongoing and forthcoming missions. We will exemply how future research might be triggered and supported by this diverse world of multi-, super- and hyperspectral missions based on PRISMA and EnMAP data and compare limitations and opportunities across the different spectral resolutions from a geography perspective.