Integrated land monitoring

Human activities on the Earth’s surface continue to accelerate, where future impacts in terms of deforestation, biodiversity, climate and social-economic processes are still far from known.

Monitoring and modelling these processes is increasingly carried out within a multidisciplinary approach where remote sensing and geo-information science plays a key role, providing processing and analysis of spatially explicit information at scales varying from local to global.

As a multidisciplinary group, the Laboratory for Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing links to various scientific fields to study, understand and manage human impact on landscapes, ecosystem services and to support sustainable and climate-friendly future developments. Within this theme we focus on three main topics:

  • Development of novel approaches for the assessment of land change dynamics on multiple scales;
  • Integration of earth observation data and products in interdisciplinary research, models and applications;
  • Monitoring and modelling the influence of climate and humans on terrestrial ecosystems.

Dedicated research activities are ongoing in the real-time monitoring of global deforestation and forest degradation, precision agriculture, tracking of forest carbon, land use change and greenhouse gas emissions, remote sensing support for ecological modelling, and mapping and assessment of soil properties.