CASUS Institute Seminar, Dr. Sharad Kumar Gupta, postdoctoral researcher, Center for Advanced Systems Understanding CASUS at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research UFZ, Leipzig
Abstract of the talk// Forests cover approximately 31% of the global land area and are home to 80% of the Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity. Humans depend on forests for countless ecosystem services, but these ecosystems are highly vulnerable to human-induced climate change. As our climate undergoes dynamic changes, reliable data on forest resources is required to provide objective information for sustainable forest management. Despite optical remote sensing offering a variety of techniques to assess and monitor forest changes, a persistent cloud cover decreases the number of usable images considerably. However, combining data from multiple platforms promises to increase the number of images drastically. The availability of new-generation multispectral (MS) and hyperspectral (HS) sensors offers unprecedented opportunities for long-term high-frequency forest monitoring applications.
With his research, Sharad aims to highlight potentials and challenges of obtaining spectral information from near-same-day MS and HS images. He has analyzed MS images from Sentinel-2 & Landsat 8 and HS images along with airborne images. The study site is located in the Hohes Holz forest, Magdeburg, Saxony, Germany. Sharad and colleagues performed the qualitative and quantitative comparisons in two parts. In the first part, they analyzed the reflectance values for all sensors (MS and HS combined) at few wavelengths across the visible-near infrared and shortwave infrared spectral range. This comparison was made while resampling and co-registering all sensors to 10m spatial resolution Sentinel-2 image. In the second part, the team analyzed the vegetation indices obtained from all sensors to highlight the potential of vegetation health monitoring.
CV// Sharad is a postdoctoral scientist at CASUS Görlitz working as a guest scientist at the UFZ Leipzig, where he is elaborating on the generation of essential ecosystem variables at various scales using multi-scale hyperspectral images. He is also involved in a European long-term ecological research project, where he is developing deep learning models for tree canopy detection and segmentation from uncrewed aerial vehicle orthomosaics. Sharad was a postdoctoral researcher with Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, under the supervision of Prof. Eyal Ben-dor and Prof. Marcelo Sternberg from 2022 to 2023. He worked on the development of remote sensing tools for the ecological monitoring of invasive plants in Israel. Prior to joining Tel Aviv University, he was a scientist at the Punjab Remote Sensing Centre, Government of Punjab, Ludhiana, India.
Sharad will be talking live in Görlitz. However, as the event is organized in a hybrid format that includes a videoconferencing tool by Zoom Inc., people interested in the topic have the chance to also join the talk remotely. Please ask for the login details via contact@casus.science.