Since this week, Dr. Maksim Kulikov from the University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan, arrived as visiting scientist at the Earth Observation Research Cluster. Dr. Kulikov is a research fellow at the University of Central Asia’s Mountain Societies Research Institute where he is broadly working on environmental research involving soil, vegetation, and climate science. His research work is basing upon field work as well as the analysis of UAV and satellite data where he is for instance developing machine learning models for tree species identification.
In the upcoming two months, we aim to advance the existing collaboration between the University of Central Asia and the EORC. Currently, we are joining our expertise on UAV and satellite based vegetation monitoring in the “FluBig” project dedicated to better understand the feedbacks of vegetation and hydromorphology in river systems. During the time at Würzburg, we aim to extend our focus and jointly advance machine learning and remote sensing models for mapping Kyrgyz forest ecosystems along with their biomass and carbon storage at high spatial resolution. By integrating and extensive multispectral UAV data collection with Sentinel-1 and -2 as well as GEDI LiDAR data, we aim to work towards a first 10 m resolution dataset of Kyrgyz forests and their ecosystem services. We are looking forward to lots of joint discussions and hands on work!