Mission

  • How will geo- and ecosystem functions respond to the global environmental and societal transformations?

  • What are the spatiotemporal dynamics of change in the land-atmosphere water, energy, and carbon feedback systems?

  • How can we quantify and assess Biodiversity-Ecosystem-Functioning (BEF) relationships across scales?

  • How can we best integrate remote sensing techniques and modeling frameworks to improve our understanding of the Earth system?

Answering fundamental research questions of this kind and developing the right tools for this endeavour is the scientific mission of the RSC4Earth. Also key to our mission is preparing the next generation of Earth system sciences for addressing this quest.

Recent Publications

Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.

Comprehensive Quality Assessment of Satellite- and Model-Based Soil Moisture Products against the COSMOS Network in Germany

Soil Heat Extremes Can Outpace Air Temperature Extremes

Quantifying changes in hot temperature extremes is key for developing adaptation strategies. Changes in hot extremes are often …

Leaf-Level Coordination Principles Propagate to the Ecosystem Scale

Fundamental axes of variation in plant traits result from trade-offs between costs and benefits of resource-use strategies at the leaf …

Meet the Team

Groups

Principal Investigators

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Hannes Feilhauer

Professor for Remote Sensing in Geo- and Ecosystem Research

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Miguel D. Mahecha

Professor and head of the Earth System Data Science group

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Jian Peng

Professor for Hydrology and Remote Sensing/Head of Remote Sensing Department (UFZ)

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Michael Vohland

Professor for Geoinformatics and Remote Sensing

Researchers

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Eya Cherif

PhD candidate / Remote Sensing in Geo- and Ecosystem Research

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Francisco José Cuesta-Valero

Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow / Remote Sensing Department (UFZ)

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Daniel Doktor

Senior Scientist & Group Leader of Land Cover & Dynamics

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Ida Flik

Research Fellow

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Almudena García-García

Postdoctoral scientist / Remote Sensing Department (UFZ)

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Claudia Guimarães-Steinicke

Postdoctoral fellow / Remote Sensing in Geo- and Ecosystem Research

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Veronika Grupp

Scientific coordination in NFDI4Earth / Earth System Data Science

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Sarah Habershon

Research Assistant

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Marco Hannemann

PhD candidate / Remote Sensing Department (UFZ)

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Christopher Hutengs

PhD candidate / Geoinformatics and Remote Sensing

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Maksim Iakunin

Post doctoral scientist / Land Cover & Dynamics

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Chaonan Ji

Postdoctoral fellow / Earth System Data Science

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Julia S. Joswig

Postdoctoral scientist / Remote Sensing in Geo- and Ecosystem Research

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Guido Kraemer

Postdoctoral associate / Earth System Data Science

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Maximilian Lange

Postdoctoral scientist / Land Cover & Dynamics

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Pedro J. Leitão

Postdoctoral scientist / Remote Sensing in Geo- and Ecosystem Research

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Antonia D. Ludwig

PhD candidate / Remote Sensing in Geo- and Ecosystem Research

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Swapna Mahanand

Postdoctoral associate / Earth System Data Science

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Daniel Mederer

PhD candidate / Remote Sensing in Geo- and Ecosystem Research

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Milena Mönks

Scientific project management in the Breathing Nature initiative / Earth System Data Science

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David Montero

PhD candidate / Earth System Data Science

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Francesco Martinuzzi

PhD candidate / Earth System Data Science

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Karin Mora

Postdoctoral fellow / Earth System Data Science

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Clemens Mosig

PhD candidate / Earth System Data Science

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Kolja Nenoff

Research fellow / Earth System Data Science

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Sebastian Preidl

Research fellow / Remote Sensing Department (UFZ)

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Anne Reichmuth

Research fellow / Land Cover & Dynamics

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Soroor Rahmanian

Postdoctoral fellow

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Martin Reinhardt

Postdoctoral fellow / Earth System Data Science

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Toni Schmidt

PhD candidate / Remote Sensing Department (UFZ)

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Michael Seidel

PhD candidate / Geoinformatics and Remote Sensing

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Maximilian Söchting

PhD candidate / Earth System Data Science

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Salim Soltani

PhD candidate / Remote Sensing in Geo- and Ecosystem Research

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Daria Svidzinska

Postdoctoral fellow / Earth System Data Science

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Khalil Teber

PhD candidate / Earth System Data Science

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Sebastian Wieneke

Postdoctoral associate / Earth System Data Science

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Sophie Wolf

PhD candidate / Earth System Data Science

Support

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Angelika Brachmann

Office management / Earth System Data Science

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Andreas Schmidt

Scientific Technician & Research Software Engineer / Remote Sensing Department (UFZ)

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René Voigt

Technical employee / Physical lab technician

Alumni

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Jesús A Anaya

Researcher / Earth System Data Science

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Teja Kattenborn

Postdoctoral scientist / Remote Sensing in Geo- and Ecosystem Research

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Xiangyi Li

Visiting PhD student / Earth System Data Science

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Zhan Li

Postdoctoral scientist / Remote Sensing Department (UFZ)

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Friederike Naegeli de Torres

PhD candidate / Geoinformatics and Remote Sensing

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Kim Schmidt

PhD candidate / Remote Sensing in Geo- and Ecosystem Research

Scientific portfolio

DeepFeatures

This project aims to create an holistic datacube with latent space variables based on Sentinel-2 spectral indices

PARSe Biodiversity

Biodiversity effects on Plant-Atmosphere interactions analysed with Remote Sensing (PARSe Biodiversity)

ml4earth

Deliver novel AI techniques for earth observation satellite data for studies in earth and climate sciences

Cubo

Easily create EO mini cubes from STAC in Python.

Awesome Spectral Indices

A ready-to-use curated list of Spectral Indices for Remote Sensing applications.

DeepExtremes

Develop and test novel artificial intelligence explanatory tools to decipher compound events (e.g., drought and heatwave) based on “mini-cubes” with high spatial resolution.

COCAP

COping CAPacity of nations facing systemic crisis – a global intercomparison exploring the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

MoDEV

The project MoDEV (Model-Data fusion for understanding Environmental Variability) investigates the interplay between carbon and water cycles for three biomes: forest, grassland and agriculture with special focus on the impacts of extreme hydrologic and climatic events as well their long-term trends.

Virtual Lab

The Virtual Lab provides computing infrastructure for teaching.

Forest Condition Monitor

Establishing a national forest monitor to assess and visualise vegetation condition for a better risk-management of German forests.

Digital Forest

Develop a near real-time forest monitoring concept and capitalize on latest advances in AI for predicting major impacts of climate extremes.

NFDI4Biodiversity

Deliver practical tools for researchers and improve data availability for environmental studies/ecology.

NFDI4Earth

Addresses the digital needs of researchers in Earth System Sciences with the aim to understand the functioning of all subsystems of the Earth system and their interactions.

Earth System Data Lab

The Earth System Data Lab is a virtual laboratory providing global earth observation data sets and processing tools.

Satflux

Project to derive long-term, near-global ground heat flux estimates from satellite remote sensing data. These estimates will improve our understanding of the recent changes in subsurface conditions and will allow to estimate global changes in ground heat storage during the last 10 to 20 years

Brief History

 
 
 
 
 

Kick-off

Leipzig University & UFZ

Sep 2020 – Present
In September 2020 all new professors started their work in the RSC4Earth and started to build their teams.
 
 
 
 
 

Implementation phase

Leipzig University & UFZ

Jan 2019 – Dec 2019
Scouting internationally for new people to help building and implementing the new centre.
 
 
 
 
 

Brainstorming

Leipzig University & UFZ

Jan 2018 – Dec 2018
Given the rapid advances in remote sensing and data-driven methods, the Leipzig University and UFZ decided to join forces and strengthen the excellent research already implemented in the grand context of biodiversity research, meteorology, and ecosystem ecology.

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