Nick Kupfer is currently pursuing his PhD in satellite remote sensing at the Research Center Jülich within the OrganoRice project to support farmers in Vietnam's Mekong Delta in the conversion from conventional to organic rice farming. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and an M.Sc. in Geography and has a strong regional background in Southeast Asia.
Dr. Felix Bachofer has been serving as the Head of the "Coasts and River Basins" research team at the Earth Observation Center (EOC) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) since 2020. He earned his Ph.D. in 2016 from the University of Tübingen and subsequently engaged as a postdoctoral researcher in various research projects at both the University of Tübingen and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 2018, he transitioned into the role of a researcher at DLR, where he has been actively involved in managing several research projects. His research pursuits primarily revolve around the exploration of urban development, coastal areas, flood and drought dynamics, and the intricate relationships between these factors and climate change, all through the lens of multi-sensor remote sensing. Dr. Bachofer also leads a multidisciplinary research consortium funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). This initiative is dedicated to fostering the sustainable development of urban regions in Central Vietnam. Moreover, he takes on the responsibility of supervising the Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (U-TEP), a project funded by the European Space Agency and the Horizon Europe funded project Nostradamus.
Juliane Huth is currently a Research Fellow at the German Remote Sensing Data Center of the German Aerospace Center at DLR. She graduated from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2004. She brings experience from previous roles at the University of Würzburg, DLR, Gaf Ag and Universität Der Bundeswehr München. Her Working areas include Remote sensing, Environmental Monitoring, and Marine Remote Sensing.
Prof. Harry Vereecken received a Ph.D. in agricultural sciences from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (1988). He obtained his habilitation in hydrogeology in 1997 at Bonn University, Germany. Since 2000, he is full professor at Bonn University, Faculty of Agriculture, and director of the Agrosphere Institute, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH. He is a member of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Germany, the scientific director of TERENO, a network of environmental observatories in Germany, a former chair of the International Soil Modeling Consortium (ISMC) and an honorary professor at Tianjin University, China. He served as associate editor, co-editor and editor-in-chief of Vadose Zone Journal. His research interests include hydrology, hydrogeophysics, and soil science.
Dr. Lutz Weihermüller received a Diploma degree in geography from the Universität Bremen, Bremen, Germany and a Ph.D. degree in the field of numerical modeling from the Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany, in 2005. He is currently working as a Senior Scientist with the Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich, Germany. His research interests are the numerical modeling of water, solute, and gas transport in the unsaturated zone and parameter estimation for various applications. Additionally, he works on agroecosystem modelling. Dr. Weihermüller is a member of the European Geosciences Union, the International Soil Modelling Consortium (ISMC), and the Soil Science Society of America.
Dr. Carsten Montzka received a Ph.D. degree in geography from the University of Bonn, Germany, in 2007, for the integration of multispectral remote sensing data into nitrogen cycle simulations. In 2004, he joined the Institute of Bio- and Geosciences: Agrosphere (IBG-3) of the Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. Since 2007, he has been working on passive microwave retrieval for soil moisture and SMOS and SMAP validation activities. This includes modeling and upscaling of surface soil moisture, coupling hydrological models with microwave emission models, multiscale model calibration, and the comparison with and integration of airborne remote sensing data. His current work has mainly been focused on the development of multiscale soil moisture data assimilation techniques as well as on airborne active/passive microwave campaigns to support new microwave-based soil moisture missions. Recently, he started working on multi-sensor combinations on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (thermal, multispectral, LiDAR) and their integration into agricultural and forest monitoring. In 2017–2023 he focused on co-leading the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Working Group on Calibration and Validation of soil moisture and is an alumnus of the Arab-German Young Academy for Sciences and Humanities (AGYA), Berlin, Germany.
