About my work and me

Spatial Data Science, Earth Observation & Geoanalysis

Welcome at jakob.schwalb-willmann.de, a page about what I do and what I am interested in! I am a spatial data scientist, specialized in Earth observation and geo-spatial data analysis. Professionally, I am passionate about tapping into new data sources that are currently underutilized in Earth observation research, integrating them with existing data, and finding patterns previously undetected. For this, I am developing and applying machine and deep learning techniques.

For example, I am fascinated by the idea of employing animals as environmental informants by tracking them on large global scales and then letting a computer learn patterns in their interactions with the environment. To detect and utilize such animal-environment interactions for Earth observation, I have been jointly analyzing global animal movement tracking data and temporally synchronous environmental data acquired by satellites using deep learning.

Currently, I am working at the Earth Observation Research Cluster (EORC) of the University of Wuerzburg, where I am part of the UAV Team. There, we fly drones equipped with various sensors to conduct ecological research in cooperation with partners located around the world – from the African savannas through German temperate forests to the Arctic tundra. We use predictive modelling to turn this data into information of value for ecological applications.

I am teaching students in the international EAGLE MSc. programme (Earth Observation and Geoanalysis) and the Biosciences MSc. programme (Ecology) at University of Würzburg, where I hold a lecturer position since 2019. In cooperation with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Max Planck Institue for Animal Behavior, I am conducting my PhD research on the potentials of animal-environment interactions for remote sensing research.

You can find me elsewhere on the web here and here or on Bluesky and GitHub. Thank you for stopping by!

Last updated: 2025-03-20