Janik grew up in a small village on the countryside called Schneppenbaum. After highschool, he strayed into Geophysics during his studies in Cologne before he found his passion for Earth observation during his bachelor in Bonn.

Along his study, Janik put the focus on remote sensing methods and topics dealing with the world’s high mountain regions. At an early stage, he was able to gain valuable insights into research during his work at the department of remote sensing where he assisted field campaigns and GIS analyses on grasslands in Germany. For his bachelor thesis, forest ecosystems aroused his interests and he started to get obsessed stalking them with Sentinel-1 and -2. This ended up in a paper on modeling forest species and structural diversity of temperate forests, he published with his colleagues in Bonn.

Exhausted and long-term damaged by the huge effort of writing and publishing a paper, he spent a semester abroad in the Bernese Alps afterwards. Returning from Bern, he was abundant of experience and determination to start the EAGLE’s program to further expand his knowledge in Earth observation. At the same time, he began to work at the Senckenberg Institute of Biodiversity and Climate Change in Frankfurt, where he studies drought impact on beeches with remote sensing. He especially welcomes the wealth of new concepts, methods and people he comes across along his current journey in Earth observation.

While Janik is remotely sensing, he is particular interested in interpreting the signals from the Earth’s surface received by his favorite satellites and translate them into meaningful information that can be used in monitoring approaches together with other information. When he is not engaged in his studies, Janik enjoys to sui or to meet up with friends, playing a ‘gemütliche Runde’ soccer or going for hikes in the mountains when he’s traveling around.