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European grant for simultaneous airborne acquisitions

Researchers of ITC have been awarded an European grant for simultaneous airborne acquisitions of hyperspectral, thermal, LiDAR and Radar data for monitoring plant traits.

Bavarian Forest National Park

The European Facility for Airborne Research (EUFAR) recently funded a major initiative by ITC researchers to collect airborne Hyperspectral (VIS, NIR, SWIR) and thermal, LiDAR and Radar imagery over the Bavarian Forest National Park in Germany. Uniquely, the image data span a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum to be recorded simultaneously by aircraft flying in parallel. The aircraft and associated instruments are transnational and supported by CNR (Italy), NERC (UK) and DLR (Germany).

The data will be used to support a summer school on “Introducing hyperspectral, thermal, LiDAR and Radar remote sensing for ecologists and environmental managers” which will be held in July 2017. The summer school will be open to all PhD, post-doc and early carrier researchers affiliated to European universities and research institutes. The European Commission will provide funding for 20 participants to attend the school.

In addition, ITC PhD students will benefit from the data as part of an integrated biodiversity research program on species distribution modeling, ecosystem structure and plant trait monitoring. The advantages of remote sensing for monitoring – i.e. rapid, real-time, repeatable, and synoptic – allow prediction of biodiversity change in response to calamities such as bark beetle die-back and climate change.

ITC researchers involved in this project include Prof Andrew Skidmore, Dr Roshanak Darvishzadeh and Dr Tiejun Wang.