staff news: Dr. Insa Otte

Insa is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Earth Observation Research (EOR) hub at the University of Würzburg (www.earth-observation.org). Insa has studied Physical Geography, Meteorology and Peace- and Conflict Studies at the University of Marburg with a focus on climatology and tropical montane ecosystems. In 2017, she completed her PhD in Environmental Informatics at University of Marburg, where she analysed atmospheric moisture input along an elevation and disturbance gradient under the impact of global vs. local changes at Mt. Kilimanjaro. She was lucky enough to stay in total 6 months at the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania for conducting field work during her PhD.Her passion for mountains, tropical ecosystems and large mammals on the African continent led to various African research projects and now to a habilitation project. Within this project she plans to develop a new remote sensing method for habitat conservation of endangered species in Central and Eastern Africa in close cooperation with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and two National Parks in Ruanda, namely Akagera and Nyungwe National Park.Mainly, Insa is focusing on two research lines: (i) conservation of tropical habitats and (ii) improving and providing easier access to large amounts of earth observation data as scientific coordinator of the Data Cube (https://datacube.remote-sensing.org) Team at EOR.She is involved in projects in southern, western and eastern Africa – all of them also including capacity building of our project partners and beyond.