MORPH project: second field trip to Iceland

During a second field trip to Iceland in June 2019, the MORPH project team visited the northern parts of the country, which are characterized by mass displacements, surface deformation and volcanic activity. Also, a great variety of geomorphological features is present in this area.


The field trip focused especially on the validation of remote sensing based mapping results in the field, the acquisition of field photos for the generation of 3D models using SfM (Structure from Motion) technique as well as GPS measurements for specific points of interest, e.g. landslide-affected areas. In addition, achieved results and ongoing project activities were presented and discussed with the collaboration partners from the University of Iceland in Reykjavik.



For more information on the project, please visit the webpage @ http://morph.zgis.at/ or contact Daniel Hölbling / Barbara Friedl

ÖAW Kommission GIScience: Keynote Announcement: Michael F. Goodchild @ GISci...

ÖAW Kommission GIScience: Keynote Announcement: Michael F. Goodchild @ GISci...: Keynote: ‘GISCIENCE AND GEOGRAPHY: AN EVOLVING RELATIONSHIP’ Michael F. Goodchild, Member National Academy of Sciences US Please

Successful PhD defense of Ovidiu Csillik

Ovidiu Csillik successfully defended his PhD Thesis “Spatio-temporal object-based image analysis for land-use/land-cover mapping”. He started his PhD research in October 2015 within the framework of the Doctoral College “GIScience” and finished his PhD research incredibly fast within 2 years and 10 months.

Ovidiu’s research aimed to develop efficient, fast and accurate OBIA workflows for single and time series satellite images for land-use/land-cover mapping, with a special focus on mapping agriculture. First, he integrated the concept of superpixels into multiresolution segmentation workflows. Subsequently, the incorporation of the temporal domain of the satellite images into the analysis led to the development of object-based workflows for crop mapping from time series of Sentinel-2 satellite images. Finally, an object-based time-constraint dynamic time warping (DTW) workflow was developed in an object-based software environment, the first implementation of DTW in an OBIA framework.

This research has a significant potential to enable automation and objectivity of OBIA workflows for time series data analysis and was documented by six major publications.

Ovidiu will start his Postdoc career at the Department of Global Ecology of Stanford University in the research group of Greg Asner in August 2018.

We wish Ovidiu all the best for his future career and endeavours!

GeoS4S International Summer School-3 in Germany!

The consortium of the GeoServices-4-Sustainability (GeoS4S) project consisting of 10 universities from Europe, China and Thailand conducted its 3rd International Summer School (ISS-3) for 2 weeks at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE), Germany from 9th to 20th July, 2018.

Student and Teacher participating in GeoS4S-ISS-3

The GeoS4S-ISS-3 has been designed to enhance geospatial competences of postgraduate level students and young faculty from all the consortium members. The consortium selected 48 participants hailing from 18 nationalities but studying / working at the 10 partner universities in Europe, China and Thailand. The experts from the GeoS4S consortium taught 5 modules during the first week and 5 modules during the second week of the ISS-3 and each module had about 10 participants.

The teachers from the consortium universities taught the concepts and methods of the modules they have developed within GeoS4S framework and trained the participants in implementing those concepts and methods using geospatial data and GIS software.

The Interfaculty Department of Geoinformatics-Z_GIS of the University of Salzburg, Austria serves as project coordinator assisted by co-funding from the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Key Action 2 CBHE (Capacity Building in Higher Education) from October 2015 to October 2018.

This is the last International Summer School planned within GeoS4S project and the consortium will organise two dissemination conferences, one in Thailand and one in China during the next months.

Sen2Cube.at: Sentinel-2 Semantic Data Cube Austria

On 3 July 2018, the FFG-ASAP project Sen2Cube.at held its kick-off meeting in conjunction with the AGIT/GI_Forum conference in Salzburg.

Aside from the academic partner (University of Salzburg, Z_GIS), the project involves AMA (Agrarmarkt Austria), ZAMG (Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik) and the university spin-off SpatialServices.

The Sen2Cube.at project will be taking very relevant steps towards building an Austrian data & information cube. It will exemplarily show that semantic content-based image and information retrieval (SCBIR) is possible in big Earth observation (EO) databases. This innovation will allow human users to query and analyse EO data on a higher semantic level (i.e. based on at least basic land cover units and encoded ontologies). Planned tasks include:

• developing algorithms for systematic and automated semantic enrichment for Sentinel-2 images to reach a semantic level up to land cover types, ready for semantic content based querying
• identifying suitable database technologies to develop spatio-temporal modelling and querying techniques in semantically enriched EO databases using encoded ontologies to decrease the complexity of queries for human user interaction
• developing a Web interface for human-like queries based on spatio-temporal relationships and explicitly specifying spatio-temporal models for different envisaged user groups.

The data & information cube is generic, meaning it can be useful for multiple thematic domains. The potential will be demonstrated by developing different services in a generic, proof-of-concept environment for Austria. These services include enabling semantic content-based image retrieval, generating cloud-free mosaics for user-specified time slices and developing an App for location-based queries through time.

Contact: Dirk Tiede, Z_GIS