Month: May 2019

  • The Triangle of Shared Data Sources

    Todays data production, maintenance, and use have changed in the last years.  While these tasks were reserved to professionals until a few years ago, the situation has changed.  This is no different in the geographical domain. Volunteers gather general information in Wikipedia and geographical information in OpenStreetMap.  Twitter users provide not only text snippets but…

  • Paper on High-Frequency 3D Geomorphic Observation using Hourly LiDAR Time Series

    Can you imagine how much sand is being moved on the beach in the course of a week? Did you ever observe truckloads of sand being transported on the beach in the absence of storms and bulldozers? It is hardly possible to estimate to the naked eye, but can be quantified with permanent terrestrial laser…

  • Paper on Analysis of Feature Relevance in Deep Learning for 3D Point Cloud Classification

    A paper investigating the relevance of (pre-calculated) features for 3D point cloud classification using deep learning was just published in the ISPRS Annals of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. The study presents a non-end-to-end deep learning classifier for 3D point clouds using multiple sets of input features and compares it with an implementation of the state-of-the-art…

  • ISCRAM 2019 in Valencia- Towards closer exchange in crisis management between practitioners, stakeholders and researchers

    The 16th ISCRAM conference took place in the city of Valencia (Spain). It succeeded again to gather an international audience of researchers that shared their work all around crisis management. As ISCRAM is mainly interested in the support and intersection of practical application in crisis management and research, the focus was however again on another…

  • Open access publication of terrestrial laser scanning and terrestrial and UAV images of Alpine Regions in Austria

    Very interesting terrestrial laser scanning and terrestrial and UAV image datasets of different Alpine sites in Austria have just been openly provided on PANGAEA. The data are related to the first (2015) and second (2017) edition of the Innsbruck Summer School of Alpine Research – Close Range Sensing Techniques in Alpine Terrain and can, for…

  • Successfull PhD Defence by Clemens Jacobs on Plausibility Estimation of Citizen Science Observations for Biodiversity

    Last week Dr. Clemens Jacobs successfully defended his PhD about methods for assessing the data quality of citizen science observations of organisms. Congratulations, well done!!! We wish all the very best for the future! The research aimed at using geographic context as an information source for estimating the plausibility of an observation, e.g., of a bird,…

  • Assessment of health risk due to heat and fine particle matter in Germany

    The risk of exposure to heat and fine particel matter on human health has gained significant media coverage recently. The so called dieselgate and the ban of driving for older diesel vehicles in several German cities have renewed attention to the health risk of fine particle matter – for which traffic is a major emission…

  • SYSSIFOSS project start and first test scans

    On May 1st, the SYSSIFOSS project has started and first test scans have already been conducted in the forest. Experciences from these initial testings serve as a basis for many field campaigns this summer which aim at the acquisition of high-density point clouds of 140 single trees with a RIEGL VZ-400 terrestrial laser scanner. Moreover,…

  • TdLab Geography at ICCA 2019

    Nicole Aeschbach (TdLab Geography / Transdisciplinarity Lab) participated in the ICCA 2019. The German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, the State of Baden-Württemberg and the City of Heidelberg jointly hosted the International Conference on Climate Action in Heidelberg on 22 and 23 May 2019. It was great to meet active…

  • Disaster Risk Reduction, OpenStreetMap and Missing Maps at Global Platform 2019

    Global Platform 2019 in Geneva Creating maps helps humanity. Drawing maps together with communities is crucial for effective risk reduction interventions, ensuring no one is left behind. The progress of the implementation of the targets set by the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) have been key discussion points during this years Global Platform…

  • OpenRouteService with waypoint optimization

    As promised earlier this year, we are very happy to finally announce the unveiling of our new route optimization endpoint! We deployed an instance of the popular Vroom open-source engine, which is capable of solving complex Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) in record time. This type of problem always occurs when multiple locations need to be visited…

  • First test flights with brand-new UAV-borne LiDAR system

    The 3DGeo group is currently testing their new UAV-borne LiDAR (ULS) system. The integrated system consists of a DJI Matrice 600 copter, a RIEGL miniVUX-1 UAV laser scanner and is complemented by an inertial measurement unit and a realtime kinematics GNSS. Combining the different components in one system allows for high-accuracy (cm) acquisition of 3D…