Projects
Postdoc (ongoing) – Satellite/UAV remote sensing for ecological research applications. Multi-spectral, thermal, LiDAR and hyper-spectral sensors, movement tracking and machine learning for ecosystem analysis. Focus on human-environment relations (terrestrial plastic detection), animal-environment interactions (animal movement and animal path mapping) and biodiversity in forests. Southern Africa, Central Europe, High Arctic. Earth Observation Research Cluster, University of Würzburg. PhD (2025) – Dissertation: Potentials of animal-environment interactions for remote sensing research, supervised by Prof. Dr. Stefan Dech (German Aerospace Center, DLR/University of Würzburg), Prof. Dr. Martin Wikelski (Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior/University of Konstanz) and Prof. Dr. Tobias Ullmann (University of Würzburg), mentored by Dr. Martin Wegmann (University of Würzburg). MSc (2018) – Thesis: A deep learning movement prediction framework for identifying anomalies in animal-environment interactions, supervised by Dr. Martin Wegmann (University of Würzburg) and Dr. Kamran Safi (Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior). BSc (2016) – Thesis: Comparison of different algorithms for calculating broadband albedo from AVHRR data, supervised by Prof. Dr. Wolfram Mauser (Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich) and Dr. Corinne Frey (German Aerospace Center, DLR). An Introduction to Spatial Data Analysis, a textbook for students, researchers or anyone else who want to learn working with spatial data from the ground up. Read more about it here or buy the book at Pelagic Publishing. Visit my GitHub profile for more details on my open source contributions: https://github.com/16EAGLEResearch
Writing
Open Source Software
moveVis, an R package providing tools to visualize movement data (e.g. from GPS tracking) and temporal changes of environmental data (e.g. from remote sensing) by creating video animations. A peer-reviewed open-access paper accompanying moveVis has been published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.basemaps, an R package to download and cache spatial basemaps from open sources such as OpenStreetMap, Carto and Mapbox.RStoolbox, an R package providing a wide range of tools for every-day remote sensing processing needs (co-author).odcr, an R package that serves as an interface to the Open Data Cube.odcbox, a repository hosting everything needed to install an Open Data Cube instance as a docker container that serves a Jupyter notebook environment running both a Python kernel and an R kernel.getSpatialData, an R packaga making it easy to query, preview, download and preprocess multiple kinds of spatial data via R.