Overview MSc Research Topics
Improved quality of life is one of the New Urban Agenda (NUA) underlined sectors to be incorporated "in every urban development or renewal policy and strategy" (UN-Habitat, 2017).
2D outlines or footprints of buildings are either generated from high resolution images or point cloud data.
Protected areas are useful governance tool to mitigate biodiversity loss and preserve threatened habitats and species.
Global production, transportation, and consumption of oil can cause inevitable spills into the environment (typically from pipelines, oil wells, and storage facilities) cont
More and more cities are developing digital twins of their crucial public infrastructures.
The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is changing worldwide due to shifting cli
Climate planning has been arising since the Paris Agreement [1]. However, the last data shows that the proposed goals are far from being reached in time [2;3].
For years, MODIS images have been instrumental in divers environmental and ecological studies such as monitoring deforestation, land-us/land-cover (LULC) changes, agriculture and epidemiology.
Green spaces are fundamental for the well-being of individuals and communities as they provide areas for recreation, which is essential for the quality of life in cities.
Saffron is the most costly spice by weight worldwide, and an important ingredient for Middle-Ea
The decisions made on the spatial configurations and distributions in the built environments (urban or rural developments) directly affect the environment as well as the interests of various stakeh
Urban land surface temperature (ULST) dynamics are influenced by a myriad of factors related to urban landscape character.
Rainfall data series from climate models (i.e.
Rainfall data series from climate models (i.e.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates the global community must remove up to1000 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) by 2100 to limit warming to no more than 1.5°
The Antarctic ice sheet covers almost the whole area of the Antarctic continent.
Artificial intelligence (AI) for urban development is growing rapidly.
Interest in the formal representation of citizen science comes from portals, platforms, and catalogues of citizen science projects; scientists using citizen science data for their research; and fun
Nepal is one of the poorest countries and affected by multi-hazard risks, including earthquakes, landslides and floods.
When disasters happen, it's important to include the people who are affected in making decisions and getting ready for emergencies.
LAI is one of the most critical vegetation biophysical variables as well as remote sensing- enabled essential biodiversity variables due to the controlling role of green leaves in biological and ph
A key task for conservation science is to collect accurate and precise data on animal distribution.
One of the aims of conservation and rewilding groups in Europe is to assess whether natural grazing l
The strong interaction between health and disaster risk reduction has been made explicit by the current pandemic crisis.
Postharvest losses are a main threat to food security, which is a measurable waste of the edible share of food that is available for consumption but is not
Satellite image time series (SITS) data are increasingly being used for vegetation-related remote sensing applications.
The presence of noises, clouds and another atmospheric phenomena represent an obstacle for optical remote sensing applications.
Brazil is the biggest coffee productors in the world, with millions of hectares of plantations.
Estimating aboveground biomass is essential for generating vegetation inventories and understanding carbon cycles.
Estimating aboveground biomass is essential for generating vegetation inventories and understanding carbon cycles.
An accurate method for automatically mapping deforested areas constitute an important tool to inform and enable deforestation containment policies.
An accurate method for automatically mapping deforested areas constitute an important tool to inform and enable deforestation containment policies.
The climate in cities and metropolitan areas (i.e., urban climate) is often different from the climate in the surrounding rural areas due to the presence of buildings, pavement, a
Mapping and monitoring slums is essential to ensure the sustainable development of the cities to ensure a quality of life for people.
In general classes such as Buildings and Vegetation and Terrain are well classified. The classes Bridges and Water are more problematic, even for deep learning algorithms.
To model air pollution in urban environments while accounting for urban forms using convolutional neural networks (CNN) or Vision Transformers (ViT), open access earth observation
Deep Neural Networks (DNN) is considered as a panacea for different problems in several application areas. But what about spatial modeling?
The goal of this study is to detect and map bark beetle infestation in a temperate forest in Germany using DESIS hyperspectral satellite
The goal of this study, as part of the larger BIOSPACE project, is to map and model foliar pigments, including chlorophyll and caroten
Forest health worldwide is under pressure as a result of prolonged droughts.
In recent years, the Greater Horn of Africa has suffered from prolonged droughts, associated with forced migration and food and water security issues.
The challenge of this topic is to detect a change or trend on top of seasonal fluctuations.
With the increasing availability of remotely sensed data, there is a pressing need to develop efficient and scalable methods for converting satellite images into useful information.
Clouds usually represent a big problem for optical remote sensing.
The digital twin (DT) (smart city/3D modelling) topic currently attracts the attention and interest of many cities, authorities, industrial and research organizations at national, European and inte
Urban systems consist of multiple interrelated components that include both physical and social stru
Drought has wreaked havoc to human societies throughout history. Drought is usually caused by a multitude of factors starting from the deficit of precipitation when compared to climatic mean.
Earth Observation data is increasingly important for how cities function and are accessible to inhabitants.
Understanding the types of vegetation that composes the land cover on non-anthropic areas and the land use for anthropic areas is essential to understand e
The circular economy action plan issued by EU in 2020 is a key feature towards Sustainable Development, promoting all type of strategies for regional
Unsafe houses and natural hazards are increasingly common threats for citizens of low-income countries.
The past decades have seen rapid advancements in space-based monitoring of essential water cycle variables, providing products related to precipitation, evapotranspiration, and so
ET is the water lost to the atmosphere through plant stomata during photosynthesis and from the surface following a wetting event.
Mediterranean and temperate forests are being affected by intense and frequent droughts that will become mo
Urban environmental planning and management, both in theory and practice, have indicated the need for participatory inclusivity as much as possible.
Thermal remote sensing is a type of passive remote sensing since that detects naturally emitted radiation. Most thermal remote sensing for vegetation conducted in the 8-14 μm wavelengths.
The use of printed satellite and aerial images for spatial data collection has been prevalent in many participatory geography approaches.
UN-Habitat estimates that over one billion people around the world live in slums, which are often located in hazard-prone areas.
Geothermal systems are one of the sustainable sources of our future energy mix.
In the past few years, unexpected disruptions such as the Ukraine war and the global pandemic reveal the fact that our food systems are highly connected an
Forest health worldwide is increasingly deteriorated by droughts.
With down-looking satellite sensors, our three-dimensional (3D) world is commonly represented with 2D remote sensing images.
Frequent persistent drought events in Mediterranean ecosystems and insect attack have generated an extreme
Deep learning algorithms can achieve great accuracies, but there are also concerns about biases and generalizability to unseen data.
The so-called Right to Light in Great Britain, the European standard EN 17037 “Daylight in Buildings”, and similar design codes or standards of good practice provide recommendations for ensuring th
Sustainable production of food and other biomass-derived products needs checking if, indeed, no harm is done to biodiversity, our environment in general, or to people.
Climate data will be used to assess heat risks.
This study aims to develop methods that can be used to delineate pollution events.
Catastrophic natural disasters present formidable challenges to build resilient communities.
Raw materials are economically and strategically important for society, and an explosion in demand is predicted for many raw materials be
Deep learning algorithms have gained increasing popularity in remote sensing due to their accuracy.
Individuals and the organisations in which they work need to cooperate in projects and research to withstand an increasing competition.
This thesis topic wants to explore how the design of public spaces can facilitate social interaction, and how ICTs can be used to i
Improved quality of life is one of the New Urban Agenda (NUA) underlined sectors to be incorporated "in every urban development or renewal policy and
Improved quality of life is one of the New Urban Agenda (NUA) underlined sectors to be incorporated "in every urban development or renewal policy and strategy" (UN-Habitat, 2017).
The urban space is a place of intersecting struggles and opportunities.
In the realm of artificial intelligence (AI), the advancement of large language models (LLM) like GPT-4, the base model of ChatGPT, has revolutionized natural language processing.
The digital twin (DT) (smart city/3D modelling) topic currently attracts the attention and interest of many cities, authorities, industrial and research organizations at national, European and inte
Impervious surfaces are the Earth’s surfaces covered with mainly anthropogenic and artificial structures, such as built-up areas, roads and streets, and parking lots.
Interactive Planning Support Systems (IPSS) implemented on a maptable are a promising way to involve professional stakeholders as well as citizens in participatory planning processes.
A workflow is considered to be a combination of data and (software) operations.
Urban slum is often vulnerable to environmental changes such as subsidence, as it has densely populated inf
Spanish PAZ, which was launched in February 2018, offers co-polarimetric (with HH and VV channel) SAR images with X-band and (down to) 11 days repeat cycle.
Sufficient nutrition remains a major challenge for rural households in the Sub-saharan region of Africa.
The arid and semi-arid Lands (ASALs) of northern Kenya are characterized by extremes of poverty and c
Soundscape ecology is a developing research field where interactions between sounds and the environment are studied.
As a result of hardware miniaturization and ubiquitous internet access, there is a wealth of user- and sensor-generated geographic content available, from social media activity to private weather s
Humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross Red Crecent and Unicef use risk models to identify vulnerable populations and mitigate the affects of natural disasters.
Recently, mortality and reduction in forest stand densities for Brutia pine (Pinus brutia) h
Crop mapping plays an important role in agronomic planning and management both for farmers and policymakers. Satellite remote sensing sensors have become efficient tools for mapping croplands.
The rate of carbon uptake by vegetation is not fully known.
Food insecurity is a big issue in eastern and southern Africa and projections are that this is going to get worse with climate change and variability.
LINK TO RESEARCH PROJECTS
The MSc topics link to two ongoing larger research projects that allow being part of international research teams - both projects just started:
Monitoring forest dynamics is essential for identifying the area most at risk for forest degradation and de
This topic is part of the ITC Space4Restoration project, which aims to develop remote sensing tools t
The topic can take several directions depending on the interest of the student.
A wide range of topics are available (See below).
Natural hazards such as debris flows, landslides or flooding often occur due to extreme hydrometeorological events.
Objective
To develop a deep learning model to estimate the timing of phenological events over large area
“Nature-based solutions” (NBS) or “building with nature” have received global attention as a multidimensional approach to reduce impacts of climate change and associated meteorological disaster ris
The pursuit of economic growth, traditionally measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is increasingly being problematised for its effectiveness in enhancing societal well-being
Behind the many different data sources available to innovate geospatial technologies are large data infrastructures needed to produce and process geospatial data.
Palm oil is an important vegetable oil.
Promoting disaster preparedness and resilience by co-developing stakeholder support tools for managing the systemic risk of compounding disasters.
So far, more than 6.5 million people have died from COVID-19, and still, there are around 1000 deaths per day.
Urban green spaces can provide a lot of benefits to residents, including fresh and cool air, protection from flooding or space to meet others or do s
Food packaging is responsible for 5.4% of global food systems emissions in 2015 (Crippa et al.,
As an essential part of food security, diet diversity often requires frequent household food security surveys to monitor.
Farmers, agronomists, private enterprise and policy-makers need to know field conditions with sufficient early-warning.
In cities, temperatures are often higher than in the surrounding areas and can also vary locally.
The volume of pollen produced by trees differs from year to year. Especially beach and oak trees have mast years.
As a result of hardware miniaturization and ubiquitous internet access, there is a wealth of user- and sensor-generated geographic content available, from social media activity to private weather s
The goal of this study, as part of the larger BIOSPACE project, is to map and model leaf and canopy nitrogen content and their spatial va
The goal of this study, as part of the larger BIOSPACE project, is to map and model Specific Leaf Area (SLA) and its spatial variation in
New and affordable sensors (e.g., Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense, Sensebox) have greatly increased the potential to collect finer-grained environmental information, especially on topics impacting on hum
The impacts of extreme heat are deadly, on the rise globally, and preventable.
Amazingly, the Dutch nature conservation monitoring system makes very little use of remote sensing.
Urban planning issues and processes prescribe a collaboration of various stakeholders, which is nowadays often supported by planning support tools.
About 75% of the Earth’s land surface has been altered and land use change has affected more th
Global Navigation Satellitye Systems (GNSS) receivers are commonly used as a positioning tool, but these are negatively degraded by reflected signals from nearby objects from bu
Background
Visceral leishmaniasis (VL), also known as kala-azar, is a deadly parasitic
In many countries, shortage of drinking water is a problem.
Spanish PAZ, which was launched in February 2018, offers co-polarimetric (with HH and VV channel) SAR images with X-band and (down to) 11 days repeat cycle.
To inform policymakers about the agricultural landscapes and food production, accurate and timely monitoring of crop type is required.
Primary production is the growth or accumulated rate of biomass in plants.
ITC has been supporting UN-Habitat, the United Nations organization for urban development, since 2011 with the development and implementation of a regional urban planning approach
Mapping slums in different urban environments across the Globe is extremely important for locating and prioritizing hotspots of urban poor for urgent climate action to combat the impact of cl
Food packaging is responsible for 5.4% of global food systems emissions in 2015 (Crippa et al., 2021).
The accurate prediction of crop yields is a critical element in ensuring global food security, managing agricultural markets and supporting the decision-making processes of farmers and
For a skyscraper to be stable, it must be built on a strong foundation. However, several factors such as persistent use, aging and deterioration, etc.
The growing public health concerns about ambient air quality such as particulate matter (PM) concentrations suggest the need for a holistic monitoring to guide interventions.
The new Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, launched in December 2022, aims to map Earth's water in unprecedented detail to help manage climate change and to shar
Geo-referenced time series are data describing the time-changing behavior of one or more attributes at fixed locations and consistent time intervals [1].
The goal of sustainable transport is to promote better and healthier ways for individuals and communities to meet their travel needs while reducing the negative social, environmental and economic i
A huge task is waiting to realize the global agenda in relation to tenure security as recognized by the sustainable development goals (SDGs) set by the UN.
Thermal remote sensing is a type of passive remote sensing that detects naturally emitted radiation.
Most of what we know about the internal structure of the Earth (and other rocky planets and moons) comes from the study of seismic waves and other ge
The world’s human population has been tripled during the past 70 years, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 7.7 billion now (UN-Habitat).
Although large language models (LLM) have been around for a while, the public release of ChatGPT demonstrated a quantum leap in the abilities of these models to respond to natural
Daily totals or daily averages are convenient to work with and provide a first, rough impression of the wea
GLOFAS is an ensemble of 3 components: A Metrological Model and Forecast (Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) forecasts of the ECMWF IFS), A hydrological model (LISFLOOD) and a web
Despite the proven effectiveness of early warning early action in reducing disaster impacts and saving lives, around one-third of the glo
Tsunamis caused by landslides flank collapses and pyroclastic density currents during or after an eruption are cascading hazards that could hav
The fusion of UAV-based and satellite-based data has emerged as a powerful approach for plant health monitoring in agriculture.
Droughts are exacerbated by climate change, which makes them more frequent, prolonged, and catastrophic.
The Netherlands is a county filled with river systems, the protection of susceptible areas depends on our understanding of the likelihoods of flood occurin
The droughts of 2018-2020 in the Netherlands created great social distress, induced huge economic damages in agricultural production, disrupted river navigation and damaged buildi
Climate change is nowadays prominently present on the political and thus scientific agenda, which is reflected in the Dutch Delta-Programme for Spatial Adaptation (“Delta-Programma Ruimtelijke Adap
Student will use earth observation based data and techniques to understand urban socioeconomic patterns, and attempt to interpret these patterns by using physical metrics of urban morphology obtain
To develop a model to estimate the timing of phenological events over large areas from time series of earth observation data using vision transformers, a fierce alternative to tra
Water level in lakes and rivers is a critical parameter to monitor for water managers. It captures the state of surface waters, and, if placed strategically, can be used in e.g.
More and more cities are developing digital twins of their crucial public infrastructures.