Education and Communication

The project SAR-EDU is a joint education initiative of the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena (FSU), the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and numerous partners in radar-related scientific institutions. In a previous project phase two main cornerstones for education in the field of applied radar remote sensing were established. Since 2013 the FSU is hosting a yearly summer school on applied radar remote sensing. Furthermore DLR and FSU published the SAR-EDU learning portal in late 2014 (https://saredu.dlr.de). This is the foundation of a new generation of web portal, due to be launched in mid 2017, that provides access to a vast range of teaching material, online courses and a community of learners. This platform will host the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on radar remote sensing in fall 2017. Furthermore, the platform is designed to serve as host for courses and resources from several international organistions working with EO data and tools, therefore providing a central point of entry for EO education in the future. This presentation will give insights into the features of the new web portal, the contents of the Radar MOOC as well as some general topics on E-learning.

"Man must rise above the Earth – to the top of the atmosphere and beyond – for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives". Following the quote of the Greek philosopher Socrates, the bird’s eye perspective of satellites enables humankind to explore the spatial patterns on our Earth, detached from the limited scope of the human eye. High-technology sensors amplify the scope of perception to the global and the invisible. The presentation shows how Copernicus data is used to introduce young people to the benefits of remote sensing. In the light of the Copernicus services it will be explained how Sentinel-based teaching units can be developed in order to communicate the knowledge about and the handling of natural and man-made phenomena in times of global change. Built on the basis of intermediality, interactivity, and interdisciplinarity, children are introduced to the world of data behind fancy-colored satellite images. The activities focus not only on the curriculum of applied subjects like Geography and Biology, but also on Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science. Exemplarily, different digital learning units will be demonstrated: (1) “Oases – Explored from Near and Far” introduces basic models of different types of oases to pupils. The riverine oasis is the central example of the unit. In an interactive process, the pupils can deduce a thematic map from a Sentinel-2 image. In (2) “Brown Coal – Land Use Change through Surface Mining”, the pupils compare and evaluate the development of different areas affected by surface mining with the help of a combined Landsat and Sentinel-2 time series. In so doing, the pupils see the relevance of brown coal surface mining for the German energy supply and are able to assess the effect of recultivation. Last but not least, (3) “Summer in the City” deals with thermal infrared remote sensing and Sentinel-3 images taken from Berlin. Finally it will be shown, how augmented reality and the development of miniature massive open online courses are going to play an important role in encouraging young students to engage in earth observation and gain media literacy.

The presentation will report the activities conducted during the Summer by a team composed by staff from a university department, a National Research Institute, and an outreach NGO, collecting measurements of night sky brightness and other information on artificial lighting, in order to characterize light pollution issues on portions of the Tuscan coast, in Central Italy. These activities will combine measurements collected by the principal scientists, citizen science observations led by students, and outreach events targeting a broad audience. This campaign aggregates the efforts of three actors: - the BuioMetria Partecipativa project, which started collecting light pollution data on a national scale in 2008 with an environmental engineering and free/open source GIS core team; - the Institute of Biometeorology from the National Research Council, with ongoing studies on light and urban vegetation and a consolidated track record in environmental education and citizen science; - the Department of Biology from the University of Pisa, which started experiments to assess the impact of light pollution in coastal environments in 2015. While the core of the activities concern in-situ data, the campaign will account also for remote sensing data, such as VIIRS imagery, thus considering hetereogenous data sources. The collaboration of an interdisciplinary team in the study of artificial lighting issues is not a common case in Italy, and the possibility of undertaking the campaign in Tuscany has the added value of operating in one of the territories where it is possible to observe both sites with extremely high lighting levels, and areas with extremely low light pollution, especially in the Southern part of the region. Given the intertwining of monitoring a communication actions in the context of the project, it is also expected that this effort will contribute to the promotion of night skies with a good quality as an important asset for sustainability. All information on previous activities related to the teams' activities, as well as the documentation of progress of the Summer campaign, may be accessed via the http://www.buiometriapartecipativa.org (all content is made available in English and Italian). The attachment is a copy of a poster presented at the fourth international confernece on artificiali light at night, held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in September 2016, which provides a visual overview of our activities in relation to the proposed topic, to that date.

In this contribution the Training on Remote Sensing for Ecosystem modelling (TruStEE), funded by Horizon 2020 Marie Curie ITN 2016, is presented. TRuStEE aims to capacitate the next generation of scientists to understand and deal with the increasing pressure of environmental change on ecosystem functioning and land-atmosphere interactions. Specifically, TRuStEE will train a new generation of scientists with complementary and interdisciplinary skills in ecosystem modelling, plant physiology, remote sensing technologies and big data analysis, addressing the specific objectives: 1) to identify essential biodiversity variables (EBVs) and the link with plant traits (PTs) and ecosystem functional properties (EFPs), inferable from remote sensing, 2) to investigate a completely new avenue for assessing vegetation photosynthetic efficiency from remote sensing measurements of canopy fluorescence, 3) to assimilate diverse remote sensing data streams with varying spatial and temporal resolution in dynamic ecosystem models and 4) to exploit new satellite missions (e.g. ESA-FLEX, ESA-Sentinels, NASA-GEDI) and Earth Observation products for the upscaling of PTs, EBVs and EFPs. Understanding and predicting ecosystem functions remains a major challenge in evaluating ecosystem services and biophysical controls on biosphere-atmosphere interactions, as current dynamic vegetation models are still not capable of grasping the spatial and temporal variability in ecosystem processes. Remote sensing (RS) data at a range of scales from proximal observations to global extent sampling can detect essential changes in plant traits (PTs), biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, providing a method for scaling-up. However, there are still methodological and technical constraints that hamper a systematic incorporation of RS in ecosystem models, including scalability and multi-source data integration issues. These are the main topics developed in the individual PhD projects of twelve early stage researchers (ESRs) involved in TRuStEE training network. The students will attend a 3-year training and they will strongly benefit from the network of internationally recognized scientists and private companies with relevant expertise in these topics through training courses, summer schools and secondments.

Science is going through a major crisis, which includes numerous issues in its communication. One of the issues is access to scientific outputs. Dissemination of scientific outputs, including those from publicly funded research, is often restricted to individuals and institutions belonging to certain socio-economic positions. Journal subscription and data access fees are exorbitant, and hence create access barriers. Transparency is another issue. Communication which lacks transparency- notably with respect to the methodology adopted, data relied upon, negative results obtained, and source of funding for the research- can result in misleading information. Moreover, the style of communication in most cases is such that unless one is familiar with the relevant field, understanding and applying the knowledge generated can be extremely difficult. These problems have significant impact on accessibility and reproducibility of science, and hinder collaboration and social engagement. In a developing, multi-lingual country like India with inequitable access to education, means of communication, and scarce research resources, this crisis develops new dimensions. It therefore needs to be addressed in accordance with systemic deficiencies specific to the Indian scientific community, and social needs peculiar to the country. It is in this context that we have conducted a survey among researchers in five different disciplines - Economics, Law, Mechanical Engineering, Medicine, and Physics; with the objective to understand their practices pertaining to conducting and communicating research, and policies governing the same. One of the aims of the survey was to understand the individual and systemic factors which affect scientific communication, in order to recommend suitable changes to existing incentive structures. The survey was part of a larger project on ‘Open Science’, which seeks to facilitate a sustainable open science movement in India by identifying optimal legal and policy interventions. In our presentation, we seek to highlight the major insights from the survey. In particular, we would like to focus upon: a) factors relevant to the researchers while deciding modes of publication and data sharing; b) transparency in scientific communication, i.e., whether researchers share details of research methodology adopted, research tools used, limitations to their research (including errors in research/ data), negative results, and source of funding; c) policies adopted by institutions and funding agencies with regard to sharing practices, and relevant compliance mechanisms; and d) researchers’ satisfaction with the existing rules or practices relating to scientific communication in their institute, and attempts made to change the same. The data from our study demonstrate exorbitant article processing charges for open access publishing, high focus on impact factor of journals, lack of clear sharing policies with robust compliance mechanisms, and a general lack of motivation towards making scientific communication accessible and understandable, as significant problems in the Indian scientific research community. We hope that our presentation will help provide the Indian perspective on the multidimensional crisis in scientific communication. The feedback received on our presentation and discussions at the conference will be extremely helpful for our project and in refining recommendations for facilitating a sustainable open science movement in India.

The fifth year for the NASA World Wind Europa Challenge will climax in Helsinki Finland during the last week of August. The theme this year, as last year, is Solutions For Sustainable Cities. The Europa Challenge has always had Europe's INSPIRE Directive to guide project development. This year we continue to have INSPIRE guide us and more specifically, we are looking for urban management solutions. Almost every city needs the same data management tools as every other city. How can we help cities work together to be more sustainable, more livable and more resilient? The top six teams are gathering in Helsinki to share their work and help to improve each others application. We will present the winning results of those top six teams from this global challenge.