IBS 2024 in Prague - Environmental Remote Sensing meets Biogeography

From 7 to 10 January, our new PhD student Eric Kosczor participated in the 11th Biennial Conference of the International Biogeographical Society (IBS) at the Prague Congress Centre (CZ). Eric presented a poster about his methodological approach and preliminary results of mapping changes in structural diversity in agricultural regions of Saxony using historical and modern remote sensing data. The aim of his research is to quantify and analyze the visible changes in landscape heterogeneity in historical CORONA satellite images from the 1960s and 70s together with modern Digital Orthophotos (DOPs) and to draw conclusions about the consequences for local biodiversity. His participation at IBS was made possible through the EarthBridge project which the Junior Professorship in Environmental Remote Sensing is part of.

The conference began on Sunday with a welcome reception and continued the following days with 4 symposia, 4 blocks of 5 presentation sessions and 2 poster sessions. On Wednesday evening, there was a good opportunity to socialize and make new contacts between young researchers at the so-called Early Career Mixer in a Czech pub.

Ultimately, Eric was able to receive many suggestions and proposals for his specific research question at the IBS and, above all, learn a lot, especially in topics such as biodiversity or landscape ecology, which are rather side topics in remote sensing. It also became clear at the conference that data and methods from remote sensing are becoming increasingly relevant in biogeography and thus an exchange of knowledge was also able also take place the other way round. Overall, the participation in the conference proved once again that science must always be viewed from an interdisciplinary perspective and that a great gain in knowledge can be achieved through the exchange between different research areas from which all sides profit.