Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics - Freie Universität Berlin

The film Occlusion (2026, 19′15″) is premieringat the “Visual Politics of Digital Ecologies” conference in Oxford, which is held today and tomorrow 🎬📡.
If you’re attending, don’t miss it!

Thanks so much, Stephen and Theo, for letting us be part of this experience!

Laser scan that was taken while filming for the movie.

We went into the forest together, carried out TLS scans, shared current research projects, and talked about forestry, data, and measurement.
Seeing how artists engage with our 3D data — critically and creatively — was an inspiring and enriching experience for our whole team.

Colored terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) point clouds showing a forest in 3D. Trees and vegetation appear as dense constellations of points, revealing forest structure through measurement while highlighting how laser scanning reshapes the way we see, interpret, and abstract natural environments.

Over the past year, we had the chance to take part in an art–science film exploring terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) 🎥🌲.
Working with artists Stephen Cornford & Theo Stanley gave us a fresh perspective on how our forest data can be seen and questioned beyond science.

The cover of the Cleaning Biodiversity Data in R book. It has an illustration of an Pacific Cleaner Shrimp in the middle of a navy background. The shrimp has a bright red-orange shell, pale-yellow body and white whiskers.

Still want to make cleaning biodiversity data shrimp-ler? 🦐

Good news: We just updated our Cleaning Biodiversity Data in R book, so you still can! We've updated data for 2025, added new content & fixed lots of silly typos 😀

Live the shrimp-le life:
cleaning-data-r.ala.org.au

#rstats #ecology 🧪🌏

Conference travel award opportunity:

Foreign Scholar Travel Award to attend the International Association for Landscape Ecology - North America chapter (IALE-NA) conference in April 2026.

www.ialena.org/foreign-scholar-award.html & bit.ly/IALENA-FSTA-....

Apply by Nov. 2, 2025! 🧪🌎

A new semester kicks off this week at Berlin’s universities - back to campus vibes! 🎓✨ Our team is ready for a winter term of teaching GIS & remote sensing at Lankwitz. Wishing students & lecturers alike a semester full of learning, discovery & good energy! 🚀📚🌍 #FreieUniversität #BackToCampus

Great to see so many #PlantScience journals, societies, and institutions here. Tag in if we missed one!

We are visiting our study site in the forest. Under tall pine trees our technichian shows a station with a solar pannel that is used to send data collected on the site to an online dashboard.

Together we are looking at small oak seedings in mossy undergrowth that grow beneath the big pine trees to form a new forest generation. Some small oaks are tagged with numbered blue plates. Their size is remeasured every year. In the background one can see a station with sensors that measure air temperature, humidity and light intensity.

We dig up a soil sample to see how much organic material is present on the forest floor. One can see a small pit and one of our senior researchers feeling how sandy the soil is.

We were delighted to host a research exchange with colleagues from @CzechGlobe 🇨🇿 in Berlin! 🌍

We discussed forestry-focused remote sensing, explored opportunities for future collaboration, and visited study sites like the #sensorfield in Brandenburg. 🌲📡

Thanks for the great visit!

#TeamScience

Arvin, your time with our team has been immensely valuable. Your collaborative spirit and the insightful lessons you shared have left a lasting impression.

We are so grateful to have worked with you — we’ll miss you and wish you all the best in your new work in Norway! 🇳🇴✨

20 plots, hundreds of #Riegl TLS scans, thousands of berries… 🌲🫐 and a million laughs.
Norway field campaign = success! 💪
Now we are back in Berlin and ready to process our data.

Shoutout to our amazing field crew:
Arvin, Asad, Chiara, Ephraim, Johann, Marius & Miriam!

#RonnieRieglOnTour

A laser scanner in the forest

A marsh landscape with scattered trees

A small path in a beech forest

Our fieldwork is in full go – our team is out in the woods every day batteling rain, swamps, sheep and running from cows – the dangers you find in northern Europe 😉 – all with the #Riegl on our shoulders.
But check out these stunning views we get in return! It’s all worth it.
#RonnieRieglOnTour

Wellington boots in a box

We are getting ready to head to Norway! 🌲🌾🌲
Our team will collect terrestrial laser scanning data to on the connection between forest structure and biodiversity – we are looking forward to two weeks in the beautiful boreal forest north of Oslo.
And we are prepared for swampy conditions 😉

A sunlit path lined with stone-filled metal gabion walls and dense green foliage on a university campus, leading through a lush, tree-covered area with a bright blue sky overhead. (photo by Chiara Mansi)

🛰️ Spending 5 months at the Remote Sensing Lab, Freie Universität, to advance my research on protected area management. Grateful for this opportunity and looking forward to the Norway field trip with this amazing team! – chiaramansi93.bsky.social 🌳 #remotesensing #conservation #Erasmus+ #biodiversity

Three-panel image showing a UNet model applied to remote sensing imagery. Left: grayscale UNet output showing probability map of detected features, here trees. Center: input false-color infrared satellite image with vegetation coloured in reddish colours. Right: same input with bright green overlay showing segmented tree crown areas after thresholding.

🚀 Getting started with Deep Learning for remote sensing? Check out these beginner tutorials from FU Berlin: 🧠 UNet in PyTorch: bit.ly/3GBWPx1 🛰️ Segment Anything for GeoTIFFs: bit.ly/3GBWRVF 🌍 #DeepLearning #PyTorch #GeospatialAI #UNet #SegmentAnything #EarthObservation #OpenScience

Blooming horse chestnut tree ‘Rosie’ on the GeoCampus Lankwitz, with pink blossoms, green grass, and a partly cloudy sky.

Close-up of a tree trunk equipped with environmental sensors for measuring growth, light, and soil moisture on the GeoCampus Lankwitz.

3D point cloud model of a tree from TLS scan, color-coded by height from pink at the base to yellow in the upper canopy, on a black background.

On our idyllic GeoCampus Lankwitz, smart sensors track tree growth, soil moisture & light of some of our many trees. TLS scans turn trees like "Rosie" 🌳 the chestnut into stunning 3D models 👓. #TTN #SmartForestry #IoT #TreeGrowth #LoRaWAN #ForestEcology #SensingFUB

Young oak seedlings growing in a row on a mossy forest floor under tall pine trees.

Two people wearing yellow safety vests working with a sensor device in a pine forest.

Looking up at the canopy of tall pine trees against a cloudy sky.

Solar-powered LoRaWan station with a large solar panel and control units mounted on a metal frame, installed in a forest clearing.

🌳 In Brandenburg, we’ve set up a TTN-connected station to monitor soil moisture & light intensity—exploring how these factors affect young oak seedlings growing under mature pines. Stay tuned for more news from our #sensorfield!
#SmartForestry #IoT #TreeGrowth #LoRaWAN #ForestEcology #SensingFUB

Point cloud of a forest captured with a terrestrial laser scanner. Different trees are displayed in several colours to highlight individual structures within a 3D space.

Looking forward to sharing more! Forests are more than just tall trees — and our data should reflect that! 🌿

Hua Jiang

🌲 Meet Hua (shorturl.at/3DGFl), one of our PhD researcher! His research focuses on generating high-quality virtual point clouds that realistically include lower vegetation. This helps improve tasks like semantic segmentation and biomass estimation. Smarter, more reliable ecological AI starts here.

Considering land use complexity and overlap is critical for sustainability planning. New paper led by Marie Pratzer - out in OneEarth:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

@tkuemmerle.bsky.social @matthiasbaumann.bsky.social @pedrofernandez91.bsky.social @oneearthofficial.bsky.social

LAST CALL📣 for early bird registration! These rates will NOT be extended 💸 Prices go up July 2!

Students (MSc/PhD): $650 early bird/$750 regular
Standard registration (including PDF): $950 early bird/$1,150 regular

See you in Quebec Sep 29-Oct 3! ⚜️
event.fourwaves.com/silvilaser2025/pages

📣 Just a few days to go!
Join us this Saturday, June 28 at #LNDW2025 in the Theaterhof of the Silberlaube @FUBerlin.
As a special add on we’ll be showcasing a small art project by ZK/U fellows, created in collaboration with us: Visual Cultures of Forest Carbon - www.zku-berlin.org/fellows/754/ 🌳🌲

Illustration of a Mobil Laser Scanning device

🌲 Curious about what trees do for us—and how we can measure it? Visit us at #LNDW2025 in the Theaterhof of the Silberlaube #FUBerlin on June 28th!
Together we use our new laser scanner to turn trees into 3D models to study their health, structure, & carbon storage. Don’t miss it! 🌳

An excerpt of a scientific poster showing a graphic of a Terrestrial Laser Scanner

Just picked up my poster! Off to Vienna tomorrow—can’t wait to share my work in the "Advances in Monitoring and Management of Forest Ecosystems" session next Friday. Come say hi if you're around! 🌲🔥🛰️ #LPS25

Three of us—@ffassnacht.bsky.social , @miriamher.bsky.social & @HuaJiang—are heading to the Living Planet Symposium in Vienna next week! We will present on forest practitioners' requirements for remote sensing-based products and modeling surface fuels from 3D TLS Data. Hope to see you there!🌍 #LPS25

False color view of a Sentinel-2 Scene showing Berlin

Hello everyone! We’re the Remote Sensing & Geoinformatics Group at FU Berlin. We study trees and ecosystems using tech like LiDAR, satellites & AI. From forests to cities, we’re all about research, learning, teaching and collaboration. Excited to share our journey with you! 🌳📡💥🛸🛰️🤓💻🌍