Welcome to ZFL

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ZFL Workshop 2019 1

ZFL Workshop 2019 2

ZFL Workshop 2019 3

Call for IT administrator and Remote Sensing technical support

The Institute of Geography (Remote Sensing Research Group) and the Center for Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces (ZFL) are currently offering a position for an IT administrator.

The position is assigned to the central area of the Department of Geography and supports the Remote Sensing Research Group and ZFL Remote Sensing and the ZFL in various technical tasks.

For further information please see the job advertisement.

EO and Copernicus for Flood & Drought Management in Africa – Virtual Training Workshop – December 16, 2022

Floods and droughts are some of the most frequent natural disasters that can become a major threat to livelihoods, food-security, infrastructure and even life. Remote sensing and earth observation provide valuable tools to monitor ongoing floods and drought, assess the current situation from space and produce products that can support stakeholders and decision makers.

This training is organized by the Center for Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces (ZFL) of the University of Bonn in Germany and aims to provide an overview of Copernicus tools and data in the context of floods and droughts. With the help of the tools and platforms presented during this training, you will be able to make use of earth observation data in the context of floods and droughts without the need of extensive background knowledge. There will be a focus on African examples throughout the training. The training is specifically meant for participants from African countries from government agencies, academia, NGOs or other institutions involved in disaster management or risk reduction.

Training schedule (all times are CET):

• 10:00am – 10:30am: Introduction

• 10:30am – 12:00pm: Droughts

◦ Includes introduction to droughts as a disaster

◦ The Global Drought Observatory (GDO) platform and its sister platforms

◦ Further datasets and possibilities

• (12:00pm – 1:00pm: Break)

• 1:00pm – 3:00pm: Floods

◦ Includes a thematic introduction

◦ A showcase of the GloFAS (Global Flood Awareness System) Platform

◦ Examples on how to work with data in the flood context

ZFL staff supports UN-SPIDER Technical Advisory Mission

From September 12 to 16 2022, ZFL staff members Adrian Strauch and Victor Korir are visiting Abuja, Nigeria to support the conduction of a UN-SPIDER Technical Advisory Mission. This includes the co-organization of a three day interinstitutional workshop on the use of space based information for for flood response and early warning from September 12 to 14. In addition, several institutional visits and a smaller project workshop are planned for September 15 and 16.

With these activities, ZFL supports UN-SPIDER's Bonn office and the Nigerian National Space Research and Development Agency.

ZFL at the ESA Living Planet Symposium

From May 23rd to May 27th the ESA Living Planet Symposium will take place at the World Conference Center in Bonn, close to our offices. There will be several presentations and talks held by ZFL Staff, alumni and people associated with us.

On Monday, May 23rd:
Poster Presentations by Javier Muro (Modelling vegetation traits and diversity in grasslands across scales with deep learning, UAVs and Sentinel-1 and 2 16:00), Janik Hoffmann (Modeling species and structural diversity across temperate forest types with Remote Sensing and Deep Learning at 16:00).

On Tuesday, May 24th:
Poser Presentations by Olena Dubovyk (Monitoring UN indicators of land degradation neutrality and proportion of degraded land using Multiscale Remote Sensing Datasets and Google Earth Engine: Results from Botswana and Tanzania at 16:00) and Jonas Schreier (Monitoring UN indicators of land degradation neutrality and proportion of degraded land using Multiscale Remote Sensing Datasets and Google Earth Engine: Results from Botswana and Tanzania at 16:00)

On Wednesday, May 25th:
Talks by Rebecca Navarro (Spatio-Temporal Assessment of Olive Orchard Intensification in the Saiss Plain (Morocco): A Customized Approach Using Multi-Scale Remote Sensing Data at 14:45 in the Nairobi Room) and Adrian Strauch (The GEO-Wetlands Initiative – Moving towards a global, science driven Earth Observation community to support the wise use and sustainable management of wetlands at 16:55 in Room H1-01; he will also co-host the Wetland - Methods and Algorithms, Science, Applications and Policy Session starting at 15:40 in the same room)

On Friday, May 27th:
Poster Presentation by Julian Schöne (Deforestation Assessment in Manongarivo Reserve, Madagascar, with Satellite Remote Sensing - What are the Trends and Drivers? at 12:00)

Dr. Zbyněk Malenovský appointed as remote sensing professor at GIUB

ZFL welcomes Zbyněk Malenovský as the new professor for remote sensing at the Department of Geography (GIUB) at the University of Bonn! In this position it is foreseen that he will become a member of ZFL’s Steering Committee soon.

As Chair of the Remote Sensing Research Group (RSRG), he succeeds PD Dr. Olena Dubovyk, who has served as interim professor at the Department of Geography since 2019.

Prof. Malenovský’s academic career led him through research positions in the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia, and the United States. Before his appointment at the University of Bonn, he worked as an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of Tasmania. With his international experience and his remote sensing expertise we are looking forward to future collaborations, new projects and interesting research activities. His research interests promise many intersections with previous research at ZFL, RSRG, and other research groups at GIUB. His main expertise lies in the scientific field of optical remote sensing and laboratory & field spectroscopy using drone, airborne- and spaceborne imagery. His specialty is stress ecology and remote sensing of vegetation under climate change, especially in near-shore terrestrial ecosystems of Antarctica, high mountain alpine meadows, or Australian forests.

Completion of the GlobeDrought Project

Drought Risk in Rainfed agriculture between 1981 and 2016 © Figure 3a in Meza et al., 2020, https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-695-2020)

Since its inception in 2017, the GlobeDrought project aimed to develop a web-based information system to comprehensively characterize droughts and their impacts. Now, Göttingen University, the project's main contractor, has announced its end.

Please finde the Press Release here.
The project's final report can be found here.

Latest Publications

Javier Muro, Anja Linstädter, Paul Magdon, Stephan Wöllauer, Florian A. Männer, Lisa-Maricia Schwarz, Gohar Ghazaryan, Johannes Schultz, Zbyněk Malenovský, Olena Dubovyk (2022): Predicting plant biomass and species richness in temperate grasslands across regions, time, and land management with remote sensing and deep learning. Remote Sensing of Environment, Volume 282, 2022, 113262, ISSN 0034-4257, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2022.113262.
Ghazaryan G., Dubovyk O., Kussul N. & J. Schellberg (2020): Local Scale Agricultural Drought Monitoring with Satellite-based Multi-sensor Time-series. GIScience & Remote Sensing. 57(5), p.511-524.
Landmann T., Dubovyk O., Ghazaryan G., Kimani J. & E.M. Abdel-Rahman (2020): Wide-area Invasive Species Propagation Mapping is Possible Using Pheno-Metric Trends. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 159, p. 1-12.
Graw V., Ghazaryan G., Schreier J., Gonzalez J., Abdel-Hamid A. Walz Y., Dall K., Post J., Jordaan A. & O. Dubovyk (2020): Timing Is Everything – Drought Classification For Risk Assessment. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, p. 428-433.
https://doi.org/10.1109/jstars.2019.2963576.4/6
Akinyemi F., Ghazaryan G. & O. Dubovyk (2020): Assessing UN Indicators of Land Degradation Neutrality and Proportion of Degraded Land Over Botswana Using Remote Sensing Based National Level Metrics. Land Degradation & Development.
https://doi.org/10.1002/ldr.3695
Heinemann, S., Siegmann B., Thonfeld F., Muro J., Jedmowski C., Kemna A., Kraska T., Muller O., Schultz J. , Udelhoven T. et al. (2020): Land Surface Temperature Retrieval for Agricultural Areas Using a Novel UAV Platform Equipped with a Thermal Infrared and Multispectral Sensor. Remote Sensing, 12(7), p. 1075.
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12071075

...find more publications.

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Welcome to the Center for Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces (ZFL). We are an interdisciplinary center of the University of Bonn dedicated to research and teaching in the fields of remote sensing, geoinformation sciences and spatial modelling. Our objective is to strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration within the University of Bonn and to foster high quality research activities.

Researchers from the following institutions are currently involved:

Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC)
Center for Development Research (ZEF)
Department of Geography (GIUB)
Forschungszentrum Jülich
Institute of Crop Science and Resource Conservation (INRES)
United Nations University - Institute for Environment and Human Security