Research

My research mainly deals with the development and enhancement of methods in geoinformatics, remote sensing and spatial statistics. However, thematic background varies and can roughly be divided in three topics: (1) land cover and land use, (2) epidemiology and medical geography and (3) poverty and livelihood.

Land use and land cover change

In the field of land use and land cover I recently work on the development of remote sensing methods to monitor land use changes in South-East Asia on a larger scale. I use MODIS time series at a spatial resolution of 250 meter and support vector classification to adequately map land use and changes of land use. This work ist part of my ongoing master thesis at the Geomatics Lab of the Humboldt-University of Berlin and will be published around june 2012. Furthermore, results will be used to compare land cover changes between China's province Yunnan, northern Laos, eastern Myanmar and northern Laos. Differences will be discussed in regard of deforestation displacement between the mentioned countries.

Epidemiology and medical geography

The research on (spatial) epidemiology and medical geography results from a cooperation with the Medical Faculty of the University Duisburg-Essen. In detail we work together with the department for psychosomatic medicine and psycotherapy and the department for child and youth psychatrie. We develop new methods of spatial epidemiology by combining patient data and socio-economic as well as environmental data. Furthermore we develop models of spatial patient distribution to enhance the infrastructure of medical service.

Poverty and livelihood

The work on poverty and livelihood is part of the FAO Forest Resource Assessment togehter with the Leibnitz Institute for Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe (IAMO). We mainly do research on the interaction of forest resources, poverty and accessability in developing countries.