Thursday, February 23, 2012

Doc-fForte grant for Antonia Osberger


Antonia Osberger from Z_GIS received a DOC-fFORTE grant for her project “Object-based image analysis for monitoring the impact of natural stressors in Alpine forest”. The grant was awarded on Friday, 24 Feb during a ceremony held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. The grant supports outstanding ideas presented by women in research and technology, and is provided for 3 years.

Ms Osberger’s project aims at developing an operational framework for automated analysis of forest areas affected by stressors such as storms or bark beetle attacks. The spatial variability and dynamics of a forest ecosystem will be investigated and visualized, emphasizing analysis of potentially damaging events. The overall objective is to support decision-making processes for forest operations purposes, improved regional and national forest management information and assessing the impact of measures.

This will be achieved by using an object-based image analysis (OBIA) methodology. Methods of regionalization integrated in the OBIA approach are applied to derive forest vegetation units which reflect the current condition of the forest. An advanced classification scheme generates on the basis of the delineated units a forest map, conditioned to the requirements of forest management and maintenance.

Foto: Reinhard Öhner ©

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