Welcome to ZFL
Recent News
Special issue "Remote Sensing of Dryland Environment" in Remote Sensing
We are pleased to invite your contributions to a special issue "Remote Sensing of Dryland Environment" in Remote Sensing journal (impact factor 3.952). Dr. Olena Dubovyk, the scientific coordinator of the Center for Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces (ZFL), serves, together with Prof. Zhiwei Xu and Dr. Tobias Landmann, as a guest Editors for this special issue.
Link to the special issue: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing/special_issues/dryland_environment_RS
SE4Amazonian Workshop
This week the project SE4Amazonian conducted its first national workshop in Quito, Ecuador. The project aims at the development of an electrification plan with renewable energy sources to provide energy to those who are left behind – the indigenous communities of the Amazon. Local technicians and representatives from national ministries and NGOs got to the table to discuss demand, challenges and the potential of renewable energy provision. Dynamic and enthusiastic discussion rounds made this kick-off workshop a success.
During the next two months two pilot areas will be visited by local technicians to test the first participatory mapping for Sustainable Energy for the Amazonian. Here, remote sensing products will be validated and further, energy but also general demands added via a participatory mapping approach by the indigenous communities themselves. To secure the rights of the indigenous communities a close collaboration with all partners will identify at all times which data can be collected and also be integrated in further analysis. This decision will be made by the indigenous communities themselves to respect their needs and rights. ZFL works in close collaboration with the local technicians themselves and the indigenous communities via our national partners Tratural and AmazonGISnet. For more information please see ….weblink….
A joint MSc Research Topic
We are searching for an enthusiastic MSc student to conduct a joint MSc study on spatial assessment of land degradation in Kongwa and Kiteto districts in Tanzania. The study will be conducted at ZFL with cooperation with the Geospatial unit of IITTA (Institute of Tropical Agriculture) - Africa RISING program, Tanzania. For more information see this pdf file or contact Olena Dubovyk
New guest scientist at ZFL
Dr. Felicia O. Akinyemi, an associate professor of geospatial environmental science at the Botswana International University of Science and Technology. She is on a six month research visit to the Centre for Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces (ZFL) of the University of Bonn as a Humboldt research fellow – one of Germany's most coveted international research fellowships funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH).
She works on land degradation assessment in drylands including land change and climate as drivers. During the stay at ZFL, she will work with colleagues to assess land degradation, drought and impacts, particularly on agroecosystems in Botswana using remote sensing. This complements ZFL’s ongoing land degradation and drought related research activities in neighbouring South Africa within the context of the Evidenz and GlobeDrought projects.
38th EARSeL Symposium in Chania, Greece
The 38th annual EARSeL Symposium and workshop took place between the 9th and 12th of July at the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania (MAICH), Greece. Participants and experts from all over the world presented interesting works and advances dealing with contemporary topics of interest such as natural and man-made disasters, agriculture and food security, forestry, hyperspectral and thermal remote sensing, urban and 3D remote sensing, etc. Among the keynote speakers were Gilberto Camara (GEO secretariat director), Ursula Gessner from the German Aerospace Center, Pierre Deforuny from UC Louvain, Patrick Hostert from the Humboldt University of Berlin and Matthew Hansen from the University of Maryland. ZFL had a numerous participation with 6 plenary talks and 2 posters on topics involving the use of remote sensing and GIS for characterization of droughts and their impacts on different land covers, wetland mapping, optical and SAR time series analysis and analysis of deforestation drivers in tropical forests.
For more information just visit the website of the event at http://symposium.earsel.org/38th-symposium-Chania/
EvIDENz Workshop in South Africa 2018
The EvIDENz stakeholder workshop on Earth observation-based information products for drought risk on a national basis took place between June 4th and 8th 2018 in the cities of Pretoria and Bisho in South Africa. The event was organised by the Disaster and Emergency Management Training and Education Centre (DiMTEC) of the University of the Free State (UFS) and UN-SPIDER in cooperation with ZFL, UNU-EHS and the National Disaster Management Centre of South Africa (NDMC).
The event included a session of training to present to the users the workflows and methods developed by the EvIDENz group based on remote sensing datasets to evaluate the risk associated with droughts and their socio-economic impact on the livelihoods of people that depend on agriculture and livestock in the province of Eastern Cape. ZFL also presented drought risk maps showing the degree of severity of droughts on crop and grasslands for Eastern Cape. The main focus of these activities was to support the implementation of the SFDRR (Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030) at a provincial and national level in the monitoring of the impact of droughts in the agricultural sector.
Participants included people from several provincial disaster management centers, the South African Police Service (SAPS), the South African National Space Agency (SANSA), the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA), the Department Of Water And Sanitation (DWS), the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the South African Weather Service (SWS), the North-West University South Africa (NWU), the Gauteng Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (GDARD), and the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) who actively participated in the discussions on methods.
If you want to learn more about the event visit the website http://www.un-spider.org/news-and-events/events/stakeholder-workshop-earth-observation-based-information-products-drought
EvIDENz Workshop in Ukraine 2018
Between May 14th and 16th 2018 a workshop and a training session about the methodologies and application of satellite datasets on the characterization of droughts and their impacts on the agricultural sector was conducted in Kiev. The event was organised by the Space Research Institute of Ukraine (NASU-SSAU) and UN-SPIDER in collaboration with ZFL and UNU-EHS. In this event, ZFL presented the workflows and products related to the exploitation of MODIS and medium-to-high resolution satellites such as Landsat-8 and Sentinel 1/2 to evaluate the hazard component associated with droughts within the SFDRR framework (Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030) for the oblast of Kiev. Hazard and drought classification maps for some sample areas (districts) were introduced to the stakeholders. Proposed methods were explained during a training session. Additionally, a web application based on the Google Earth Engine cloud computing platform for obtaining diverse products related to vegetation condition was presented. Participants in the workshop included the Institute of Water Problems and Land reclamation of NAAS; the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Center (UHMC); the Institute of Agroecology and Environmental Management; the State Service of Ukraine for Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre; the NCSFCT National Center Of Space Facilities Control And Test, the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine, the National Institute for Soil Science and Agro-Chemistry Research, the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, among others, who contributed with their valuable knowledge and experience to the improvement of the proposed methods. If you want to learn more about the event visit the website http://www.un-spider.org/news-and-events/events/stakeholder-workshop-earth-observation-based-information-products-drought-0.
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Latest Publications
- Dubovyk, O., 2018. Spatiotemporal Assessment of Vegetation Trends in the Post-Soviet Central Asia. In: D. Egamberdieva and M. Öztürk (Editors), Vegetation of Central Asia and Environs. Springer International Publishing, pp. 1-13.
- Lavreniuk, M., Kussul, N., Shelestov, A., Dubovyk, O. & Löw, F., 2018. Object-Based postprocessing method for crop classification maps, IGARSS 2018 - 2018 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, pp. 7058-7061.
- Ghazaryan, G., Dubovyk, O., Löw, F., Lavreniuk, M., Kolotii, A., Schellberg, J. & N. Kussul (2018): A rule-based approach for crop identification using multi-temporal and multi-sensor phenological metrics. European Journal of Remote Sensing 51, 511-524.
- Löw, F., Biradar, C., Dubovyk, O., Fliemann, E., Akramkhanov, A. Narvaez Vallejo, A. & F. Waldner (2018): Regional-scale monitoring of cropland intensity and productivity with multi-source satellite image time series. GIScience & Remote Sensing 55, 539-567.
...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:
Spokesman: Klaus Greve
