Meet the UAS team of 2023 – a long year with plenty of drone campaigns

Meet the UAS team of 2023 – a long year with plenty of drone campaigns

December 22, 2023

Our UAS team was quite busy this year and covered various study sites and ecosystems across the globe. They collected TB of multispectral, thermal and Lidar data for various applications in Europe, the Arctic and Africa. The core team consisted of our EORC staff Antonio Castañeda and Jakob Schwalb-Willmann with support of our EAGLE students Sunniva McKeever, Ronja Seitz, Jannis Midasch and Lena Jäger and lead by Dr. Mirjana Bevanda.
It was a very intense year with planning of flight missions in various conditions and terrains, with changing environments and various challenges  and always keeping an eye on the weather forecast but they managed to conduct all planned research data collections. The UAS team will of course continue the data collection in various study sites in the next year but will focus on the data analysis and publish their research findings.
Beside the field data collection and the research they also had a lot of valuable experiences during the field data collection and also enjoyed to work together and solve the various unplanned challenges, like stuck cars, never ending fog, sunburns and freezing fingers or a marriage proposal on the first launching site and a funeral near the second launch side, bird attacks on our drones, deep snow conditions and heavy transport but never lost the good mood.
Thanks to the team and special thanks to “Flappy” and “Gina” and many more helping hands in the last 12 months. Looking forward to an exciting 2024 with some old and known study sites plus a few new ones – and a few new sensors such as our hyperspectral UAS based sensor.

 

you may also like:

Contribution at SilviLaser Conference in Quebec

Contribution at SilviLaser Conference in Quebec

At SilviLaser 2025 in Québec City, PhD candidate Julia Rieder (EORC, University of Würzburg and staff member of EO4CAM) presented her work on "European Beech under Drought: Effects of Topography, Competition and Soil Water Availability." Her study uses LiDAR to reveal...

EORC at Remote Sensing Symposium in Darmstadt

EORC at Remote Sensing Symposium in Darmstadt

On 2 October 2025, Dr. John Friesen and Dr. Julian Fäth from the Earth Observation Research Cluster (EORC) at the University of Würzburg and staff members of EO4CAM took part in the symposium "Vom Orbit zur Entscheidung: Satellitenfernerkundung in der...

New Team Member at the EORC: Sonja Mass

New Team Member at the EORC: Sonja Mass

Sonja Maas joined the Earth Observation Research Cluster (EORC) in October 2025 as a research assistant for the EO4CAM project. After finishing her bachelor's degree in forestry, Sonja Maas enrolled in the EAGLE M.Sc. program at the University of Würzburg, where she...

EAGLE MSc Student Isabella Metz Wins Prestigious IFHS Student Award

EAGLE MSc Student Isabella Metz Wins Prestigious IFHS Student Award

We are delighted to share the exciting news that our MSc student Isabella Metz has been awarded the 2025 International Federation of Hydrographic Societies (IFHS) Student Award for her outstanding research on: “Analysis of Uncertainties for Error Detection and...

Josipa Subotic joined as a DBU fellow

Josipa Subotic joined as a DBU fellow

We are delighted to welcome Josipa Subotić to the Earth Observation Research Cluster as a DBU fellowship visiting researcher. Since September 2025, she has been working on her project “Detection of Snow Surfaces in the Alps Using Multispectral Satellite Images and...