Content

This course is offered to the students in the form of topic-specific lectures (+ a seminar series) with linked laboratory exercises, whereby the topics are presented by the instructors and the seminars by invited internationally-renown experts.

The course consist of three main parts:

In the first part, we study the interaction of electromagnetic radiation (from visible light through microwave radiation) with plants, soil and water. The fundamental knowledge about the interaction between light and matter is crucial to fully grasp the concepts in the remainder of the course.

In the second part, we overview image and signal processing techniques for sensing vegetation, soil and water properties and ecosystem processes using various remote sensing data and technologies. From the technological perspective, we will introduce the spectral environment, including hyperspectral and fluorescence sensing, lidar-based systems, active and passive microwave systems, and multiple viewing angle instruments. Where it concerns the extraction of information from the remotely sensed data, approaches to unmix pixels, to minimize adjacency effects, to extract vegetation and soil-water indices, to detect temporal changes and to analyze time series are discussed. The basis always remains the interaction of solar and man-made energy with vegetation, soil and water, so that an understanding of the structure and the functioning of agro- and ecosystems can be gained for monitoring and modelling purposes.

Based on the knowledge gained in parts 1 and 2, we focus in part 3 on integrated applications. We will evaluate the possibilities (and limitations) of remote sensing based monitoring and modeling in the context of: detection and diagnosis of plant ‘stress’; precision agriculture and crop management; nature conservation; landscape ecology; biodiversity mapping; forest inventory; wildfires and biomass burning; urban ecology; floods; droughts; soil and water management; boundary conditions to land, weather and climate forecasting and monitoring.

Course material

Textbook: Remote Sensing of Vegetation: Principles, Techniques, and Applications (Jones & Vaughan), ISBN-13: 9780199207794

English course notes: Remote Sensing of Vegetation, Soil and Water Systems (B. Somers, G. De Lannoy)

Format: more information

Lectures and seminars

Content

This part of the course is split up into laboratory exercises and a half day excursion.

The laboratory exercises encompass practical sessions on the main theoretical concepts addressed in the lectures (e.g. canopy and soil-water radiative transfer modeling, hyperspectral data analysis and vegetation index computation, time series analysis) as well as practical sessions on integrated applications (e.g. assessing tree health in urban environments, mapping invasive plant species, monitoring biomass dynamics in grassland ecosystems, droughts; etc.).

The half day excursion encompasses a visit to an operational remote sensing unit/company/institution.

Participation in the seminars, laboratory exercises and excursion is mandatory.

Course material

Seminar hand-outs
Dedicated software + documentation
Earth observation data sets
Pertinent scientific literature
Toledo