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University of Freiburg, Faculty of Forest and Environmental Science

University of Freiburg uses portal and satellite data for monitoring forests

The Department of Remote Sensing and Landscape Information Systems belongs to the Faculty of Forest and Environmental Science. Its main tasks are to analyse certain changes in the forest climate and to monitor damage to forests.

The department owns an extensive archive of geo data including photos, satellite pictures and aerial photos to complete these tasks.

Company
University of Freiburg, Faculty of Forest and Environmental Science
www.felis.uni-freiburg.de

Location
Freiburg

Type of Industry
Universities

Employees
17

Programs and Services
Intrexx Professional

International Cooperation: International Union of Forestry Re-search Organizations (IUFRO)

European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratories (EARSeL)

International Society for Photo-grammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS)

Requirements

To keep track of over 1,000 different photos, satellite pictures as well as radar and laser data of the landscapes a lot of effort and time was needed in the past:

Previously the metadata had to be managed in Excel tables and the research proved to be very complicated having no pictures of the different landscapes to look at. To solve that problem the department intended to handle the metadata in a portal in order to find all locations and pictures more quickly and easily.

Solution

To build this portal and to ease the research process the department decided in favour of Intrexx Professional. Instead of entering the metadata in an Excel file manu-ally, the researchers now manage the data in the portal which is also displaying their geographical location of the landscape in a map. It is now possibl to search e.g. for “rivers next to Freiburg”. As a result of this research, these rivers now are visualised on the screen and the belonging maps appear. In addition, topog-raphical maps are overlaid. The landscape can be selected by several categories.

Existing data has been integrated and the employees can even access the portal from outside they only need the necessary user rights. The platform is also used for in-house communication. It includes a knowledge database, a wiki, document management, a template for FAQs, different kinds of calendars and a resource planning application for notebooks, projectors etc.

Benefits

• All maps and documents can be accessed quickly
• Web based solution that integrates existing data
• Global data access
• Extensible Portal