Projects
Projects
Research Projects of the Geomatics Department
DeSurvey - A Surveillance System for Assessing and Monitoring of Desertification
DeSurvey integrates 10 modules on an integrated approach to monitor, assess, and model desertification from local to regional scales in the European Mediterranean. Integrated remote sensing and geomatics approaches represent one of the few available options to derive spatially explicit assessments of areas affected by land degradation or desertification processes.
DHAKA-INNOVATE
Project of a Berlin-Bielefeld Consortium to the DFG Priority Programme
1233 Megacities: Informal Dynamics of Global Change
DHAKA-INNOVATE is centred around the informal settlements of Dhaka and focuses on 3 interwoven topics of vital relevance for the future development of the Mega-City of Dhaka, Bangladesh: Firstly, socioeconomic development, limitations, and improvement strategies; secondly, climatologic and air pollution effects from local to global scale; thirdly, public health issues related to socioeconomics, climate and air pollution. The research is undertaken in a spatially explicit way, linked in with remote sensing derived meta-indicators, and integrated via GIS-based modelling approaches.
Spatio-temporal monitoring and assessment of indicators for urban
land use changes with remote sensing methods
(German: Raum-zeitliche Erfassung und Bewertung von Indikatoren des
städtischen Flächennutzungswandels mit Methoden der
Geofernerkundung)
The research is one out of 14 projects of the DFG-funded Graduate School on Urban Ecology – Shrinking Cities (DFG Graduate School 780, phase II; PI: Prof. Dr. Wilfried Endlicher, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). It is an interdisciplinary and methodologically focussed piece of research that concentrates on effects of scale on remote sensing data analysis in urban environments. The graduate school is concentrating – regionally speaking – on Berlin and its wider environment.
Post-socialist land change in the Carpathians
This project studies the consequences of the political and economic transition that is going on in Eastern Europe on ecosystems, biodiversity, and wildlife in the Carpathians. Cross-border comparisons among countries are used to get a better understanding of changing institutions, socioeconomics, and politics affect land change and biodiversity.
Urban environmental monitoring with spectral and geometric high
resolution remote sensing data
(German: Städtisches Umweltmonitoring mit spektral und geometrisch hoch
auflösenden Fernerkundungsdaten)
Hyperspectral and geometric very high resolution remote sensing data are analysed to foster the identification, description and assessment of complex ecological changes of urban structures. Synergies of both approaches have not been adequately exploited yet and shall hence lead to new insights based on a multisensoral analysis strategy. Research is focussed on impervious surfaces and urban vegetation.
Research Collaborations
Post-USSR land cover change in Eastern Europe – socioeconomic forcings, effects on biodiversity, and future scenarios
The basic scientific question underlying this study is to determine controls and forcings of land cover change. The breakdown of the USSR in 1990 offers a unique ‘natural experiment’ to test hypotheses on the relative importance of environmental versus socioeconomic factors and local decision-making versus broad-scale political and institutional change as forcings of LULCC. Due to post-USSR socioeconomic and political changes, more than half of the agricultural land is out of production in some regions and is undergoing succession to grass- and shrublands. Effectively, Eastern Europe is ‘re-wilding’ and that may offer opportunities for biodiversity conservation. This will be examined with a habitat suitability analysis for umbrella species for biodiversity.
Investigation of Rapid Urbanization Processes Using ASTER, MODIS, and Landsat Data
While production of basic land cover classifications for 100 urban centers has formed the basic data product of the Urban Environmental Monitoring Programme, intensive characterization and analysis efforts are now focused on a subset of 8 cities in concert with local investigators as part of the renewed NASA grant. These intensive efforts for the subset of cities (Berlin being one of them) include characterization of the geology, ecology, climate, urban form, and social aspects of each urban center. We use the multiple spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions available from ASTER, MODIS, and Landsat MSS/TM/ETM+ data together with ancillary spatial and social information to perform these analyses.
