Research

September 22, 2019

Evaluating the impacts of Payment for Ecosystem Services interventions

The IMPACTED project aims to understand how agro-forestry systems capture carbon stocks. Project related agro-forestry sites were established as part of a Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) project incentive scheme in the Sofala Province in Mozambique. PES is an asset-building landscape conservation and climate mitigation strategy that is being increasingly seen as a viable land use option in rural Africa.
May 6, 2019

Earth Observation can support public health

Climate change has emerged as a major risk factor for global public health acting on its own or modifying the effect of the wide array of the well-studied immediate and intermediate determinants of health. A DFG-funded Research Unit in Public Health studies how weather variability influences three major climate-sensitive health outcomes: (i) childhood undernutrition, (ii) malaria and (iii) heat stress.
June 6, 2018

GlobeDrought – large-scale identification of drought hazard, vulnerability and risk

Drought events pose a threat to crop productivity, can cause socioeconomic impacts such as decreased farmer income, and may even result in the need for international food aid. GlobeDrought combines spatially explicit, historical information on drought hazard, exposure and vulnerability from meteorological, agricultural, hydrological and socioeconomic sources to provide reliable and comprehensive information on drought risk at a global level.
April 25, 2018

Burned area mapping using Sentinel-1 SAR time series

The ESA Fire CCI project focuses on the development of long time series of burned area constructed from multi sensor satellite data. It is part of the Climate Change Initiative (CCI) of the European Space Agency (ESA). As a project partner, RSS produced the first spatial estimates of burned area for the fire prone year 2015 using on high-resolution Sentinel-1 SAR imagery.
April 12, 2018

Monitoring of tropical Wetlands using Copernicus satellite data

Demo-Wetlands is a research project, designed to explicitly address the need of international conventions for standardized methods of wetland monitoring by satellite remote sensing. As these fragile ecosystems are facing increasing pressure through global warming, pollution, overuse and land use change, up to date information on the state of global wetlands are key to support their protection.