Remote sensing position: Supporting & improving near real-time crop monitoring by satellite remote sensing, UC Louvain, Belgium

Forums: 

For the Sentinel-2 for Agriculture and Sentinels for the Common Agricultural Policy projects supported by the European Space Agency, the Research Laboratory in Environmetrics and Geomatics of the Earth and Life Institute, Université Catholique de Louvain, seeks qualified and highly motivated candidate to join its research team for:

Supporting and improving near real-time crop monitoring by satellite remote sensing (24 months)

Job description

The successful applicants will join a motivated team of young researchers in charge of research, production and analysis of various crop monitoring products using the new optical and radar Copernicus Sentinels data (http://esa-sen4cap.org/, http://www.esa-sen2agri.org/, https://sentinels.copernicus.eu/web/sentinel/missions).

In close collaboration with European consortium members and other international agencies like the CIMMYT, the new researcher will contribute to various activities linked to the two below-cited ESA projects, such as

  • developing new image processing methods to produce crop maps and vegetation indicators at national scale using high resolution satellite time series;
  • supporting Sen2-Agri operational users (World Food Program, CIMMYT,…) including field campaigns coordination, operational use cases development and near real-time map production for decision support; 
  • demonstrating the use of the Sen2-Agri processing system across the user community via experts training and on-line webinars;
  • facilitating the transfer of developed crop monitoring EO products and services to the national Agencies including capacity building and demonstrating cloud computing capabilities.

“Sentinels for the Common Agricultural Policy” (Sen4CAP) ESA project: aims at providing to the national stakeholders of the CAP evidences how Sentinels derived information can support the modernization and simplification of the CAP in the post 2020 timeframe. “Sentinel-2 for Agriculture" (Sen2-Agri) ESA project: aims at providing the international user community with validated open source algorithms and a software to process Sentinel-2 data in an operational manner to derive Earth Observation products relevant for crop monitoring in the major worldwide agriculture systems.
 
Qualifications

The applicant will be: - graduated in bioengineering, geography or equivalent; - trained in remote sensing and geomatics; - fluent in french and english; - motivated for applied research; - able to actively contribute to an international collaborative work; Additional experiences in cropping systems of the world, field measurement, crop monitoring using remote sensing, advanced image processing and Python and/or R programming are most welcomed.
 
Application

For any complementary information, please contact:

Mlle Aurelie Bellavia (+ 32 (0) 10 47 30 65) (Aurelie.Bellavia@uclouvain.be). The contract can start between August 2018 and early September 2018.The interested candidates are invited to send a curriculum vitae and a motivation letter by email (Aurelie.Bellavia @uclouvain.be and Pierre.Defourny@uclouvain.be ) before the 28 July 2018 to  

Pr. P. Defourny   UCLouvain\ELI_Geomatics   Croix du Sud, 2 bte L5.07.16 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium