Team

Dr. Thomas Jagdhuber is leading the radar signatures group at the German Aerospace Agency (DLR).His research focuses on harnessing the power of active and passive microwave remote sensing to study hydrological, ecological, and agricultural processes. By developing innovative methods to integrate data from diverse sensors, he enables precise monitoring of soil moisture, vegetation health, and cryosphere changes, under all-weather conditions. His methodological work on polarimetric decomposition techniques earned him the DLR Science Award in 2014.

A frequent visiting scientist at MIT, he has contributed significantly to NASA’s SMAP and SMAP/Sentinel-1 missions, collaborating on global water cycle research. In addition to his scientific work, Thomas is a passionate educator, serving as a lecturer at the Universities of Jena and Augsburg.

Currently, he is pursuing his habilitation at the University of Augsburg, investigating the responses of the Soil-Plant-Atmosphere System to climate change and human impacts. Through his work, Thomas Jagdhuber bridges the gap between theoretical innovation and practical solutions for a sustainable future.

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF; Cerdanyola del Vallès, Catalunya, Spain). My experience relies on the application of satellite passive microwave sensors to monitor water in soils and vegetation using soil moisture (SM) and vegetation optical depth (VOD) data. During my career I have developed fire risk assessment tools based on SMOS SM information, new metrics to assess crop yield from SMAP VOD, and new multi-frequency datasets of live fuel moisture content (LFMC) based on a novel multi-sensor (i.e., radar, lidar and radiometer) approach that disentangles the water component from the VOD signal. This research was mainly developed during my two-years work at the Microwaves and Radar Institute of the German Aerospace Center (DLR, Germany) in collaboration with the VOD4Forest team and with the MIT. Now, at CREAF, my goal is to contribute to bridge the gap between the microwave remote sensing and the ecophysiology research communities with novel estimates of water content and water potential in forests.

I am an associate professor at the University of Liège (ULiège, Belgium), where I lead the Earth Observation and Ecosystem Modelling (EOSystM) lab. My research focuses on understanding the interactions between the water and carbon cycles, particularly the impact of drought on forest ecosystem functioning. My team exploits new-generation satellite data streams, including active and passive microwave, hyperspectral, thermal infrared, LiDAR, and sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) data, to explore ecosystem dynamics and resilience to climate change.

I completed a PhD in bioscience engineering at UCLouvain (Belgium) and a postdoc at the Institute of Bio- and Geosciences, Research Center Jülich (Germany). I was also a visiting scientist at MIT and at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

My research integrates dynamic vegetation and radiative transfer models to study forest ecosystem functioning from spaceborne SIF data, and to derive vegetation water content and wildfire risk from vegetation optical depth (VOD). Through this work, I aim to advance our understanding of ecosystem processes and their response to environmental change.

I am leading the PIX Group (Process-knowledge Integrating DataExploration) at DLR Institute for Data Science. My team focuses on exploiting the potential of consumer drones for forestry applications, specifically retrieving forest structural parameters using UAV imagery.

I received my engineering degree in geodesy and geoinformatics from KIT and INSA Strasbourg in 2011, and completed my Ph.D. from KIT in 2015 specializing in interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and image analysis. My background includes extensive work with SAR time series processing and modeling for forest monitoring, building on experience at the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena and on a research stay at the University of Rom “La Sapienza”.

Through this work, we contribute to a refined understanding of forest structure, providing critical data for improved modeling of hydrological processes, climate impacts, and sustainable forest management practices.

Alexandra (Alex) Konings is an associate professor in the department of Earth System Science at Stanford University (with courtesy appointments in the Geophysics department and the Woods Institute of the Environment). She completed a PhD working with Dara Entekhabi at MIT, and has also done research at Duke University, Columbia University, and NASA JPL. Alex's group broadly researches water-carbon interactions, but using microwave remote sensing of vegetation water content to study plant drought response is one of her primary interests. She has worked on developing retrieval algorithms for VOD from radiometers (particularly the MT-DCA algorithm), machine-learning based retrieval of live fuel moisture from SAR, field work to study the relationship between L-band VOD and leaf water potential, and on using spaceborne data to study tree mortality, wildfire ignition and burned area risk, plant hydraulic trait mapping, and more. She is excited about all research that pushes these directions forward!

Andrew is an associate research scientist in the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and research faculty at University of Maryland ESSIC in Maryland, USA. His main goal is to understand how environmental variability and ex-tremes influence global plant function and evaporation, and the consequent global water cycle responses. Drylands, such as in the western U.S., are a large focus of his work. He is currently a member of the NASA ECOSTRESS Science Team and co-leads the scoping for the NASA Adaptation and Response in Drylands (ARID) proposed dryland field cam-paign. Andrew received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021 where he worked on the NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission. In 2016, he graduated from Drexel University with B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering. Andrew was formerly a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow.

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp, working at the interface of plant physiology, remote sensing, and ecosystem ecology. My research focuses on advancing our understanding of the coupling between the carbon and water cycles through the use of sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) and eddy covariance flux measurements. By combining ground-based field spectrometer observations EC systems with flux measurements from ICOS sites, I aim to disentangle the physiological and environmental drivers of ecosystem photosynthesis and transpiration. This integration allows me to explore how changes in water availability and stomatal regulation shape carbon uptake dynamics under current and future climate conditions.

In addition to ground-based approaches, I actively investigate the potential of satellite-based SIF measurements, such as those provided by TROPOMI and the upcoming FLEX mission, to scale ecosystem-level findings to larger spatial domains. My work seeks to bridge the gap between local process understanding and global monitoring capabilities, with the goal of better understanding the choreography between the water and carbon fluxes. By leveraging both in situ and spaceborne observations, I contribute to developing more reliable indicators of ecosystem function and resilience in a changing climate.

I hold a Bachelor's degree in Geography and a Master's degree in Global Change with a specialization in climatology from the University of Liège, Belgium. I am currently pursuing a Ph.D., where my research focuses on predicting forest fire risk by combining remote sensing and dynamic vegetation modeling. Specifically, I investigate how vegetation water status can be retrieved from microwave remote sensing, particularly through vegetation optical depth (VOD), and how this information can be integrated into dynamic vegetation models to assess forest vulnerability to fire. By linking satellite observations with ecohydrological processes, my goal is to improve our understanding of vegetation responses to climate extremes and to provide tools for anticipating forest disturbances in a changing climate.

I am a postdoctoral researcher specialized in microwave remote sensing of vegetation and soil. Over the years I have gained experience with combining field experiments and electromagnetic modelling of both agricultural environments and forests to disentangle radar backscatter timeseries. Currently, I am an ESA Living Planet Fellow, hosted by the university of Twente (ITC) in the Netherlands. In this role, my main goal is to increase the quality and quantity of ground reference data for satellite-based products of aboveground forest water. I use amongst others GNSS-T and various in situ sensors to monitor changes in forest water continuously. It is my mission to unlock the potential of existing and upcoming microwave satellites to advance our understanding of forest response to drought.

I perform research in the triangle between plant hydrology, remote sensing and signal processing at the University of Jena (remote sensing department) and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry Jena. I am interested in forest monitoring with microwave remote sensing and the retrieval of hydrological parameters to answer research questions in the area of tree mortality and forest resilience in climate change. I am currently conducting a series of field measurements of tree hydraulic parameters in (sap flow, leaf water potential, pressure-volume curves) to investigate their imprint in microwave signals. I co-founded the open-data initiative "VODnet", a network that spreads the novel method of GNSS-Transmissometry to well-established eco-meteorological research sites. With this, we link plot-scale plant water status and its microwave footprint to the satellite scale across a range of forest ecosystem to understand droughts on wider scales.

Florian is a research scientist and PhD student at the University of Augsburg (UniA) and the Microwaves and Radar Institute (HR), German Aerospace Center (DLR). He is also part of the Land-Atmosphere Feedback Initiative (LAFI) project (https://www.lafi-dfg.de), founded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In addition, he is co-founder and co-organizer of the VOD4Forest format. He is currently working on active and passive radiative transfer models to estimate vegetation optical depth (VOD) and plant water content in the canopy with a focus on agriculture and forest ecosystems using microwave remote sensing data. He is also working on the downscaling of satellite-based land surface temperature (LST) using deep learning. Basically, he is interested in understanding the soil-plant-atmosphere system holistically. In 2023, Florian graduated from the University of Jena (Germany) with an M.Sc. degree in geoinformatics with a focus on remote sensing.

Anke Fluhrer received the B.S. degree in geography from the Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany, in 2014, and the M.S. degree in physical geography from the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany, in 2018.

Since then, she is a Research Associate with the prospect of a Ph.D. at the Microwaves and Radar Institute (HR), German Aerospace Center (DLR), Weßling, Germany. Her research interests include terrestrial remote sensing, satellite image processing, geoinformation, and data assimilation.

I specialise in remote sensing, focusing on microwave observations of forest ecosystems. My research examines the relationships between vegetation biophysical parameters and microwave signals obtained from both active and passive sensors. I currently work at TU Dresden on the WaCoRe project (https://panmoravec.github.io/), which develops innovative methods to improve moisture estimation in forests using microwave corner reflectors. My broader goal is to advance techniques that enhance the monitoring of forest health and water balance under changing climatic conditions. I welcome opportunities to collaborate on shared research interests.

Hi everyone, I'm Marc Busuldu Tris, environmental biologist from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona with a Master's Degree in Environmental Regulation from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, currently a PhD student in the CREAF Ecophysiology and Global Change Group with a project entitled "New approaches for the study of interspecific differences in the responses of plant organs and tissues to severe droughts", which will be developed within the framework of the DRASTIC project. My thesis supervisors are Maurizio Mencuccini, Oliver Binks and Teresa Gimeno. During the first year of my PhD, I completed a stay at the DLR Oberpfaffenhofen, in which we operated the Dielectric Assessment Kit for Thin Layers (DAK-TL2) to characterise the electromagnetic spectrum of tree leaves and attempt to link it with their water status. The results of this work are currently being analysed, and I hope to be able to present them at the upcoming VOD4FOREST meetings.

I am ICREA Research Professor at CREAF (Barcelona, Spain) and Honorary Professor of Forest Science at the University of Edinburgh (UK). I work at the frontiers between terrestrial ecology, global change science and forestry applications. I am currently focussed on improving our understanding of the water relations of trees and of the impacts of droughts on the physiology of trees and forests at a range of scales. I have also explored themes such as the significance of nitrogen deposition for the carbon cycle of forests and the management impacts on forest carbon cycle. I have also worked closely with the forestry sector on a large range of themes, including the regional modelling of growth and carbon sequestration using a combination of process-based modelling, Bayesian data assimilation and LiDaR remote sensing.

I am a researcher at the Universitat de València (Spain). My research focuses on modeling, characterizing and understanding microwave sensor data, with focus on soil moisture and vegetation optical depth. I am involved in several ESA studies around the upcoming CIMR mission.