Last week, Laura, an 8th gen EAGLE Student, participated in the Summer School of Alpine Research, conducted by the University of Innsbruck, in the beautiful location of the Austrian Oetztal in Obergurgl. The focus of the Summer School was on Close Range Sensing Techniques for investigating Alpine Environments. Talks by experts from TU Delf, TU Wien, TU Dresden, TU Munich and Heidelberg University were accompanied by fieldwork to collect and analyze data on the alpine environment.

Laura’s group was assigned with quantifying erosion rates along an alpine riverbed through Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS). After the fieldwork, the analysis of the multitemporal 3D point clouds with the py4Dgeo Python library and in CloudCompare followed. The group aims at publishing the results in the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. If successful, the work will also be presented by one of her colleagues at the ISPRS Geospatial Week in Dubai in April 2025.

The Summer School of Alpine Research is organized every two years by the University of Innsbruck and focuses on LiDAR, photogrammetry and thermal sensors. During this year’s summer school, interdisciplinary topics like creating a digital twin of the valley as well as creating 3D models of rock climbing routes were also concerned.

Links:

https://www.uibk.ac.at/en/geography/sensing-mountains/2024/

https://py4dgeo.readthedocs.io/en/stable/intro.html