Meet the team
Our science-backed solution-oriented team has a scientific background ranging from landscape ecology and environmental protection, watershed modeling to land use/land cover and water quality, landscape changes, suitability analysis and general geospatial modelling with machine learning.
We value new ideas, open-minded thinking, supportive teamwork and want to improve and strengthen environmental geoinformatics capabilities in Estonia and Europe.
The team is led by Prof. Evelyn Uuemaa.
Evelyn is a geographer by heart and Professor in Geoinformatics. She holds a MSc in geoinformatics and PhD in landscape ecology and environmental protection, and is developing our Landscape Geoinformatics working group as a necessity to improve and strengthen environmental geoinformatics capabilities here at the University of Tartu and for Estonia in general through leading national and international research projects. Her research interests evolve around the interactions of land use/land cover and water quality, landscape changes and geospatial modelling with machine learning. She is also interested in geospatial visualisation.
Landscape Geoinformatics Lab
(+372) 737 5827
Department of Geography
University of Tartu
Vanemuise 46
51014 Tartu, Estonia
evelyn.uuemaa@ut.ee
Alex is a Distributed Spatial Systems Researcher with many years of experience in geospatial data management and web- and cloud-based geoprocessing with a particular focus on land use, soils, hydrology, hydrogeology and water quality data. His interests include OGC standards and web-services for environmental and geo-scientific data sharing, modelling workflows and interactive geo-scientific visualisation.
Alex completed a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow (MSCA) with our Landscape Geoinformatics working group on improving standardised data preparation, parameterization and parallelisation for hydrological and water quality modelling across scales (H2020 GLOMODAT) and has now started a 5-year project on spatial modelling of soil properties using machine-learning.
Merle is a Research Fellow in geoinformatics, with the main interest in landscape modelling. Her PhD and postdoctoral studies were on palaeogeography, coastal landscape, and sea level change. She focuses on terrain modelling, digital elevation data, raster and point cloud analyses.
Holger is a Research Fellow in Geoinformatics, who applies machine learning methods to large-scale geospatial modeling problems with a focus on hydrology. In his experience, the spatial representativeness of training data is the key to successful modeling, which is why he is also interested in improving the spatiotemporal coverage of big environmental datasets.
Merli is a graduate from the geography studies of University of Tartu (BSc & MSc). She is assisting the team with project management & PR tasks.
Marta is a PhD student and junior researcher in the Department of Geography. Currently, her topic of study is spatial modeling of water quality using machine learning. Her research interests additionally include hydrogeology and groundwater level modeling as well as relationships between groundwater level and various environmental descriptors.
Pamela holds a BSc in Environmental Engineering, a MSc in Geography, specializing in Geoinformatics, and currently pursuing a PhD in Geoinformatics at the Department of Geography. Her ongoing research focuses on identifying feasible areas for wetland restoration using geospatial technologies and machine learning. She is deeply interested in applying geospatial tools to face environmental challenges.
Jeonghwan is a junior researcher in the Department of Geography and is pursuing a PhD in Geoinformatics. His research focuses on developing a framework for spatial predictive modeling of soil properties using machine learning techniques. He also has a strong interest in geospatial analysis and remote sensing.
Afif currently pursues a PhD with research focuses on detecting landscape elements in agricultural fields from remote sensing data using deep learning. He holds MSc in GIScience and Earth Observation specializing in ecosystems and natural resources.
Eveli is a Junior Research Fellow in Geoinformatics. Her research aims to explore the use of high-resolution remote sensing indices for estimating functional and structural biodiversity and develop a spatial machine learning model for nationwide biodiversity prediction.
Minna is a nature conservation specialist, whose primary areas of expertise in the team cover both environmentally friendly, especially water smart agriculture and research into habitat greenhouse gas cycling for nationwide modelling. She has an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management, which also included geoinformatics and remote sensing.
Wai Tik holds an MSc in Computer Science with a major in machine learning. Currently, he is assisting the team in the software development aspect of Geoinformatics. The main focus is on web application development and integration of geoinformatics data under Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS).
Ats is a graduate from the geography studies of University of Tartu (BSc & MSc). He mainly deals with the development of map applications to simplify the presentation of the results of various research projects.
Our former team members
Raul is a passionate Geographer and Master’s graduate in Geoinformatics from the University of Tartu. He assisted the team with spatial data processing.
Desalew is a Research Fellow in Applied Geoinformatics, Department of Geography. His main research interest revolved around environmental modeling, with a particular emphasis on hydrology, soil, and land-use. He also had a keen interest in the field of remote sensing and geospatial visualization.
Desalew completed Mobititas pluss postdoctoral research grant with our Landscape Geoinformatics working group, where he worked on modeling the impacts of land-use and climate change on flow regime.
Isaac worked as a specialist in geoinformatics at the Department of Geography. His primary activities focused on applying remote sensing and machine learning to investigate land use and land cover dynamics and their influence on urban climates.
Oleksandr worked in our team 2021 to 2022 as a GIS specialist, full stack JavaScript developer, and an open data and open source software enthusiast. He has a PhD in Geography and his research interests include web-based GIS, paleogeography, and soils science. Oleksandr is focussing on web technologies and is working on the client-side implementations in our team. His main expertise is development of web-GIS applications (Node.js, Vue.js), UI/UX design, and geovisualization.
Bruno finished his PhD in our team in 2022. His thesis was focussing on the direct and indirect human-induced forest degradation across biomes. Particularly, reduction of canopy cover and the loss of carbon stocks. Currently he is working in a remote sensing company in Brasil.
Iuliia was working as a Researcher in Geoinformatics in our team from 2021 to 2022. She specialises in the environmental applications of remote sensing. Her main expertise is the remote sensing of hydrometeorological regime of peatlands in the context of climate change, as the groundwater level depth and temperature are the main factors controlling greenhouse emissions from peatlands. Currently, she is postoctoral researcher in Aalto University.
Oleksandr was Researcher in Geoinformatics in our team from 2021 to 2022. His main research interests include a spatially explicit assessment of landscape experience, cultural ecosystem services, and non-material nature’s contributions to people bridging remote sensing-based and social media data. He is involved in the project on the assessment of socioeconomic status of the urban areas using these complementary perspectives of Earth observations from space and ground. Oleksandr holds a PhD degree in Environmental Protection. Currently, he is postdoctoral researcher in Helsinki University.
Fatemeh was visiting researcher at our team from September 2019 to February 2020. Her research collaboration with Landscape Geoinformatics Group focused on quantifying spatiotemporal dynamics of C and N sinks and sources in Estonia using process-based modelling and trying to combine with remote sensing data.
Selim was visiting PhD student from September 2018 - February 2019 and his research focus was in landscape planning.
Hanna-Ingrid worked in our team while being a Master’s student in geoinformatics and currently supports the team across tasks and projects with geospatial data processing. She was also assisting lecturers in several courses.
Luise was doing an Erasmus internship in the team from September 2022 until July 2023. She studied Physical Geography in Leipzig, Germany, where she gained basic knowledge of geoinformatics and remote sensing. She supported the team in various projects and tasks related to land cover classifications, hydrological analyses, literature research and data research.
