Now the new EAGLEs are arriving and an exciting second year is about to start. But first let’s take a look back at an enjoyable summer term.

We were right off to a promising start by visiting the KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) Campus at Garmisch-Partenkirchen and listing to interesting talks of the MiCMoR PhDs about researching alpine regions. All this happened in front of breathtaking scenery, the Bavarian Alps, especially the Zugspitze, which is the highest mountain of Germany

Back in Würzburg we had quite a few interesting courses from modeling species distribution to yield prediction and other remote sensing applications related to Land and Water management.

The highlight of the term (IMHO) was our one-week field trip to Demmin, where we were given an introduction into the field work of agriculture related earth observation. It was an intense and highly interesting week full of discussions, late night- analyses and of course a ton of fun. Therefore I’d like to thank our lecturer for accompanying and teaching us on this field trip.

Field Work in East Germany

As the summer term was quite short, there was no time to rest. The next event was mostly organized by us students. The EAGLE summer dialogue was a great opportunity for an exchange between members and alumni of the chair, the DLR-DFD and the students. On this joyful evening I dare say we did a quite impressive job as hosts, especially regarding the fact that many of us haven’t organized such a kind of party before. My special thanks go to Stefan Dech for providing the necessary support behind the scenes.

As I said before we had no time to rest, since the end of term was approaching fast. While finishing our assignments some of us also had to prepare for the traditional end of term block courses given by DLR-members. So we had a short but quite informative course by Claudia Künzer. In combination with the simulated conference constructed by Martin Wegmann it was and intensive finish of a densely packed term full of interesting and informative courses.

But we are not done yet. Eight of us went on another field trip. This time we ended up in the Steigerwald research station in Fabrik Schleichach (Upper Franconia). The goal of this course was to engage in a sort of cooperation with students from the biology master program. Now we were given a really nice opportunity to use our knowledge of remote sensing to overcome the tasks of explaining the behavior/ distribution of bats and insects. On this occasion we conducted- I am quoting: “impressive”- analyses (whatever that means). In sum it was a very fun and enjoyable experience and I’d like to thank Martin Wegmann for making this field trip (probably he’d like me to add the word “awesome”) possible but even greater thanks goes to our formidable host Jörg Müller, who is the head of the research station.

As you can see, we had quite a nice and intense term and I hope that all the people we came across during this semester can keep up the really good work, when it comes to teaching the new EAGLES. So that someday even by German standards the word “awesome” is justified.

Reporting for the Students’ Board

Johannes Löw