Thesis Guidelines

You specialized or plan to specialize in remote sensing and are now seeking answers on how to write your Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis in the Earth Observation Lab?
You will find the answers to your questions such as

• Is the Earth Observation Lab the right place for me and my thesis?
• How to find a topic for a thesis?

and the entire workflow in our guidelines:

How to write a thesis in the Earth Observation Lab (PDF)

Our focal areas

Humankind is rapidly transforming the planet, triggering drastic changes in land use and climate. Identifying strategies for monitoring these changes is among the major challenges society faces in the 21st century.

At the Earth Observation Lab, we strive to find smarter ways to map when, where and in which ways land surfaces change and thereby allow a better understanding on why land use changes occur, how these changes impact ecosystem services, and what characterizes sustainable land systems. Focal areas of research relate to urban, agricultural, and forest environments. Concerning forests, we have strong ties to forest ecology, where e.g., understanding disturbance regimes ( management or natural disturbances) is of core interest, and where linkages to climate, weather events, and land use are of great importance.

For carrying out a thesis in the Earth Observation Lab, you should generally be interested in remote sensing, either from an application point-of-view, or with an interest in remote sensing methods – or ideally both. You should at the same time be keen on learning more about issues of global change and how it manifests in different regions of the world, about interactions between people and nature, and about threats to ecosystems and the services they provide.

In the Earth Observation Lab, we typically work with quantitative and spatially-explicit tools from remote sensing, GIS analyses, spatial and temporal statistics, and modeling approaches driven with or profiting from remote sensing data. We work highly interdisciplinary, often in larger and international teams, and the working language of our group is therefore mainly English (while a thesis at the Bachelor level may be written in German or English – the choice is yours).

For a successful thesis in our group, you should feel broadly comfortable with the thematic and methodological research mode outlined above. A thorough knowledge in basic statistics, GIS and remote sensing is mandatory for the topics we offer and a thesis with us will be most beneficial if you visited our classes B.Sc. modules or M.Sc. modules. Participating in our colloquium is mandatory, and – depending on your respective study regulations – you either present and/or defend your thesis during the colloquium.