Jakob Schwalb-Willmann is a PhD student at the Department of Remote Sensing at the University of Wuerzburg, investigating the potential of animal-environment interactions for remote-sensing-driven environmental research. In this context, he is interested in the utilization of machine learning to integrate movement tracking and remote sensing data for geoanalytical applications, including the retrieval of ground-truth data, the identification of phenological events or the detection of environmental changes and disruptions in animal-environment interactions.

From 2016 to 2018, he was enrolled in the EAGLE MSc. programme and graduated of University of Würzburg in 2018 with a Master’s degree (M.Sc.) in Earth Observation and geoanalysis. While being enrolled, he worked at the Department of Remote Sensing as a student research assistant. During an internship at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, he had the opportunity to gain knowledge on animal movement analysis and the overlaps between Geoanalysis and Ecology, and has been involved in the development of a movement analysis web platform. From October 2017 to April 2018, he spent an ERASMUS+ semester in northern Italy, working at the European Academy of Bolzano (EURAC). There, he developed a processing framework to detect alpine-wide forest change, being part of the Sentinel Alpine Observatory. He finished his studies with his Master thesis on the use of animal movement data for environmental research, titled “A deep learning movement prediction framework for identifying anomalies in animal-environment interactions”. From 2013 to 2016, he studied Geography and Sociology (B.Sc.) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and joined the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in the context of his Bachelor Thesis research on calculating broadband surface albedo from narrowband sensor data.

Jakob is developing and maintaining getSpatialData, an R client for querying, previewing and downloading satellite imagery, and moveVis, an R tool for visualizing animal movement along with environmental data. He is a co-author of RStoolbox, providing tools for remote sensing data analysis and processing, of which he wrote a spectral unmixing function. Jakob is a passionate aircraft pilot, holding his pilot license since 2012. Personally, he enjoys cooking and likes photography and filming.