About my work and me

Jakob Schwalb-Willmann – Spatial Data Science, Earth Observation, Machine Learning

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 using deep learning to jointly analyze global animal movement tracking data and temporally synchronous environmental data acquired by satellites.

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 remote sensing 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 investigated the potentials of animal-environment interactions for remote sensing research as part of my PhD (2019 to 2025).

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

Last updated: 2025-04-17