How does taking into account vertical variability of Soil Moisture impact on predicting vegetation productivity? Does this impact depend on climatic areas and vegetation types? These are the main questions addressed by a recently published paper, outcome of Living Planet Fellow Sophia Walther research. The study demonstrates how, at the global scale, semi-arid areas and …
High-resolution images collected over a mixed forest ecosystem with the HyPlant sensor, deployed as an airborne demonstrator of the forthcoming ESA-FLEX satellite have been exploited in this study to explore the potential of a novel metric based on far-red sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (F760) to map the functional diversity of terrestrial ecosystems. Plant functional diversity, defined …
Sophia completed her Bsc (2011) and Msc (2014) studies in meteorology at the Free University in Berlin. In her PhD, Sophia specialized in global vegetation remote sensing, with a focus on phenology as observed by means of sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence and traditional reflectance-based approaches, both at the Free University Berlin, the Geophysical Research Centre (Potsdam, …
Living Planet Fellowship research project carried out by Sophia Walther. Variations of water availability drive plant growth and vegetation carbon uptake from the atmosphere. At present, this induces substantial fluctuations in the global carbon balance and in year-to-year accumulation of atmospheric carbon. Under climate change, water stress is likely to be amplified by more frequent …
Zina Mitraka is a Research Associate at the Remote Sensing Lab (rslab.gr) of FORTH. She is a mathematician by training (Applied Mathematics Department of the University of Crete, Greece) with further studies in Environmental Engineering (MSc in Environmental Engineering from the Technical University of Crete, Greece) and a PhD on satellite Earth Observation for urban …
Living Planet Fellowship research project carried out by Zina Mitraka. The rate at which global climate change is happening is arguably the most pressing environmental challenge of the century and it affects our cities. Temperature is one of the most important parameters in climate monitoring and Earth Observation (EO) systems and the advances in remote …
An experimental map of Europe at 10 m resolution displaying 13 land-cover classes can be viewed in full resolution on the CREODIAS EO Browser (select S2GLC and click search), or accessed as a WMS layer for expert use. It has been developed by processing Sentinel-2 data on the cloud with an almost fully automated approach. …
The first of a series of global maps aimed at quantifying change in carbon stored as biomass across the world’s forests and shrublands has been released by ESA’s Climate Change Initiative at COP25 – the United Nation Climate Change Conference currently taking place in Madrid. Read the full story.
