dr.ir. CA (Sander) Mücher

Dr.ir Sander Mücher is senior researcher Remote Sensing & GIS at Wageningen Environmental Research (WENR), within the team Earth Observation and Environmental Informatics. Active for more than 25 years at WEnR (Alterra) in the field of remote sensing and application domain biodiversity, agriculture, and environmental monitoring. In 1997 he was already co-ordinator of the EU-FP4 project PELCOM which aimed at land use monitoring with satellite data for environmental applications. Together with Wageningen University he has set-up in 2012 a ROC certified Unmanned Aerial Remote Sensing Facility (WUR-UARSF) with a wide range of national and international applications in the agriculture and natural domain (http://www.wur.eu/uarsf). He is now involved in many European remote sensing activities with a strong accent on vegetation mapping & monitoring at different scales for agriculture and biodiversity. He has been involved in many European projects such as SIGMA, ECOCHANGE, EBONE, BIOHAB and BIOPRESS. Example of a recently finished EU project is the FP7 project BIO-SOS, which aimed at supporting operational monitoring of protected sites with advanced remote sensing techniques. Now he is involved in international projects such as the Interrreg project SPECTORS in which we are developing services for nature monitoring, next to the H2020 Big Data project NEXTGEOSS in which we are responsible for the biodiversity pilot, the ESA project GLOBDiversity aiming at RS-enabled Essential Biodiversity Variables, and the H2020 project Gentore aiming at the exploitation of drones and artificial intelligence for identification and characterization of animals. Next to these international activities, he is also involved as well in many national projects in the field of LiDAR and UAV applications for biodiversity and agriculture monitoring. The integration of remote sensing and in-situ information for monitoring and modelling plays an important role in all his studies.