Project Leader
PHD RESEARCHERS
My Name is Devara P. Adiningrat (Deva). My background is geography with a major in cartography and remote sensing, and I obtained my MSc in environmental modeling and management from Lund University (SE) and ITC University of Twente (NL). Prior to joining the BIOSPACE project, I worked as a Remote Sensing-GIS specialist in Agroforestry Industry and NGO. In the BIOSPACE project, my focus is to explore the link between multi-source remote sensing and eDNA data to modeling the soil microbial diversity in old-growth forest ecosystems. During my project, I will emphasize my investigation on which potential remote sensing sensors can be linked with eDNA data. Another aim is to define which structural and functional attributes of old-growth forest derived from remote sensing can be used as proxies to model the soil properties which influence the soil microbial diversity. Further, I will investigate how scalable these proxies to be upscaled from plot level to larger extents (e.g., landscape or regional level) to upscale the soil microbial diversity model.
My name is Mélody Rousseau and I am French. I graduated from a joint international master in Biology, Ecology and Evolution, between the University of Rennes 1 (France) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands). Within the BIOSPACE project, my PhD aims at Monitoring and predicting soil biodiversity in European forests with eDNA (environmental DNA) and multi-source remote sensing data. During my project I will explore the factors shaping soil biodiversity (e.g. soil properties, leaf functional traits, deadwood amount). Furthermore, by linking ecological factors (e.g. leaf functional traits) with remote sensing data, I aim at linking soil biodiversity with Earth Observation data, and therefore improve the prediction and mapping of soil communities across European forests.
My name is Yiwei Duan, as a PhD student on the BIOSPACE project team, I am working to link forest phyllosphere eDNA to plant biochemical traits, and ultimately to remote sensing spectral data, for a better understanding and monitoring of the temperate European forest. Prior to joining the team, I studied microbiology, molecular biotechnology, and conducted research on plastic-eating bacteria during my M.Sc training in Environmental Engineering at Duke University.
My name is Alejandra Torres Rodriguez and I am from Mexico. I have a Background as an Environmental Engineer and an MSc Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation at the ITC-University of Twente. I am working as part of the BIOSPACE team. My PhD research focus on the estimation of different functional traits of tree temperate forest, from hyperspectral and LiDAR imagery, and by using different Remote Sensors (RS). To ultimately explore if we can link the Environmental DNA (eDNA) of the microorganisms with the RS imagery.