SENSE student Charlotte Walshaw is spending her second Christmas on fieldwork in Antarctica and has sent us some amazing photos.
These photos are take on the Ross Ice Shelf around Scott base New Zealand’s Antarctic research station
Charlotte’s group then moved to pyramid trough where they are mapping vegetation through multi spectral and hyperspectral drone flights. She has also been collecting ground truth data for her Sentinel 2 dataset.
This is Charlotte’s second visit to Antarctica as she spend a field season there in 2022/23 Charlotte is a student in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh and is supervised by Dr Claudia Colesie. Her project is entitled Faster, greener, and more competitive? How will vegetation alter in a changing Antarctic?
We hope the rest of the trip goes well for you Charlotte and enjoy spending time in these amazing landscapes.
The second in person SENSE industry symposium took place in Edinburgh on 1st November 2023. This was part of our cohort building week where all four cohorts of SENSE students were in Edinburgh.
The purpose of the symposium is to connect our students with our industry partners and also to help them think about and focus on life after their PhD by developing skills giving them experience which they can take forward in their careers.
The opening activity of the symposium was a showcase of the work of our Cohort 1 students who are now in their fourth and final year of their PhDs. For this session rather than scheduling a series of talks we invited each student to give a 1 minute pitch and then we had a ‘bus stop’ session where attendees were invited to visit a student for fifteen minutes and talk to them about their work. After fifteen minutes a bell would ring (and yes we had an actual bell) and the groups would move on. Some of the students had brought posters as a visual aid while others used slides or just talked and answered questions. Some feedback on this session
Really good! I much prefer this format to the traditional poster sessions
Loved it! Getting a chance to see the breadth of what the students are doing and to feel their enthusiasm is just so rewarding
This year we were delighted to be joined by Jon Styles and Alex Cornelius from Assimila and the rest if the day was focussed on responding to an ESA (European Space Agency) Initial Invitation to Tender. Assimila are very experienced (and successful) with this and started the session with a presentation from Alex giving lots of information and hints on the processes of responding to an ITT. This is something that many of our students are likely to be involved in during their future careers whether they chose to stay in academia or enter industry. Alex had some really useful information and dos and don’ts like do include block diagrams and coloured flow charts the illustrate your approach and don’t leave uploading your document to the last minute incase if technical problems. Alex also included some interesting EO information in his presentation which was enjoyed by the audience.
Our attendees fed back
From an industry perspective I found this interesting (always good to get competitor insights!), and think that the students saw the value in this too.
Helping students (and the rest of us) to understand the tips and techniques to a successful application is invaluable. Many students may go on to more funding applications so coaching in any / all of these things is a very positive thing
Then is was over to the students and industry partners for the rest of the day as they were given a assignment to come up with a response to a ESA open call and had to come up with an idea and present by the end of the day what their idea was, why they had a suitable team to do it. The students had already been assigned areas of expertise based in their particular research areas and after lunch and a bit of networking everyone set to work.
At 4pm after tidying up their presentations and assembling their groups it was time to present to out very own sense dragons made up of Jon Styles from Assimila, Professor Kathy Whaler (SENSE University of Edinburgh Director) and Professor Phil Livermore (SENSE director from University of Leeds). Each of the dragons gave a score on different areas of the presentations based on the kind of criteria which ESA would make their ITTs (objectives, experience and choose approach).
We had some fantastic ideas from the students and some very well polished presentations.
After some very tight scoring the winners were announced and team Un-scatter were the winners with their proposal for a system which would remove clouds from earth observation images to improve the detection of multi spectral properties.
Of this exercise the attendees said:
This was a good session with just the right amount of time allocated. As a student, with 2 people from industry on our table it was useful to hear about how they approached the problem. Keeping the presentations short was also good.
Having the students basically needing to form a team and deliver I thought was excellent.
The team was really happy to collect their prize and the event ended with a drinks reception and networking session.
We are very grateful to Andy, John and Alex from Assmilia who supported us in preparing this event and also all of the industry partners who attended on the day and the SENSE students for their excellent presentations and group work. The event was organised by Dr Gary Watmough the SENSE Deputy Director for Industry and Outreach assisted by Eleanor Graham the Edinburgh centre manager
Congratulations to SENSE student Lucy Wells who is part of a group at the University of Edinburgh who has received funding for an industrial collaborative project with Pentland Land Managers.
The PLMA is a group of farmers and land mangers representing over 80% of the Pentlands regional park area, working across farms to share knowledge and resources to fight climate change and biodiversity loss on a landscape scale while keeping the Pentlands accessible to the public. Six of the PLMA’s farms are working together to create a combined land management scheme, with an initial focus on carbon sequestration, water quality, and natural flood management.
Lucy will be working on the first part of the project which will be using sentinel-2 data preprocessed by the EPCC (Edinburgh Performance Computing Centre) and machine learning techniques to make a first baseline of land use in the Pentlands, with Dr Torben Sell in the School of Mathematics. The second part of the project will then use this to explore how land use changes affect flood management.
This funding came out the School of Geosciences participations in the AIMday Digital Frontiers, organised by Edinburgh Innovations. AIMday® (Academic Industry Meeting day) is based on workshops where challenges submitted by participating companies around a central theme are discussed with academics from relevant university disciplines. Read more about the AIMday Concept. We are very grateful to Stuart Simmons Head of Business Development & Innovation, in the School of GeoSciences for helping Lucy with this opportunity.
Lucy is a 4th year SENSE student at the the University of Edinburgh who is supervised by Professor Casey Ryan. Lucy’s PhD project is ‘The response of savannas and dry forests to global change: disentangling the effects of climate change, land use and changing CO2 using radar remote sensing and fieldwork’.
The SENSE CDT is running a training course on ‘Big Data & Satellites’ from 18 – 22 March, in person, at the University of Leeds. We are delighted to be able to invite up to 10 UK based PhD students to apply to attend.
Successful applicants will join the NERC SENSE CDT PhD students on the training, providing an excellent opportunity for PhD students across the UK to network. The SENSE CDT is on satellite data in environmental science, from which most of the examples will be taken.
The teaching week is a mixture of theory followed by practical exercises, keynote speakers, and transferable skills development. At the end of the week, attendees are placed into groups and work on a group project to work, which will require them to apply the skills they have gained earlier in the week. The groups will present their work back to a small panel of experts in the field on the Friday.
Schedule
Time
am
pm
Mon
The role of the tropics in carbon and water cycles Remote sensing tools to monitor land surface change & land vegetation functioning Advanced GEE
Advanced GEE – practical iCASP – translating research into applications
Tues
Jasmin Training
Jasmin Training
Wed
Weather and climate prediction for Africa: Confronting models with observational data Introduction to group work activity
Group work Who wants to be an Earth Explorer mission PI?
Thurs
Space Weather Group work
Group work
Fri
Group work
Group work presentations
Details
The course is free to successful applicants and overnight accommodation will be provided, Monday – Thursday. However, attendees will need to book their own travel and cover their travel and subsistence costs whilst on the course. Tea, coffee and refreshments will be provided during morning and afternoon breaks.
Students will be required to bring their own laptops. Information will be given prior to the training on any software downloads required.
The training will take place, at the University of Leeds, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Fairbairn House, 71-75 Clarendon Rd, Woodhouse, Leeds LS2 9PH.
Attendees are expected to attend all sessions.
Pre-requisites
Applicants must be:
in the first or second year of their PhD studies
studying in an associated field, with a strong mathematical and computing background
able to demonstrate that the training is relevant to their PhD research and is unavailable at their home institution.
How to apply
Applicants need to complete the following form https://forms.gle/vDbmE6gEzyZswPjn6
The deadline for applications is 1 January 2024 (23:59)
Successful applicants will be informed shortly afterwards.
For informal enquiries please contact eo_cdt@leeds.ac.uk
I am studying Physics on a 4 year integrated masters programme at Durham University. I have just completed my second year.
Roy Schumacher stood in a field with mountains behind him.
Tell us a bit about the project you have been working on this summer?
My project was in climate modelling, using a model called FAMOUS. The model developed around the year 2000 and is quite low-resolution. The goal of my project was to see whether the model of the carbon cycle in FAMOUS would accurately respond to volcanic eruptions. To do this we ran simulations over the last 1000 years with simulated volcanic eruptions and looked at how FAMOUS responded to those eruptions. We then compared that data to literature results from similar simulations with other climate models and the ice core CO2 record. We found that while the general prediction (increased carbon storage in the soil leading to a drop in CO2 directly following an eruption) was in line with other results, FAMOUS seemed to be overestimating the magnitude of the change.
Plot of carbon anomalies from soil, vegetation, oceans and atmosphere 1000 to 2000. Produced by Roy Schumacher.
What new skills have you learned while doing this internship?
I would say that I have learned and further developed various skills during this internship. A lot of them are related to computing; for example, using the Unix shell command line interface or improving my data analysis in Python. On top of that there are some more general skills I practised, like working independently or giving presentations for instance.
How have you found working with your research team?
I really liked working with my supervisor (Prof. Simon Tett), as he was very willing to help and generous with his time. I am also very grateful for getting the opportunity to attend the weekly discussions of the wider research group he was part of (The Contemporary Climate Group). It was very interesting to hear about what research other people were doing and listen to the academics discuss amongst each other. Finally, I was also lucky to start on the same day as another REP (NERC) student whose project had similarities to mine and so we were to discuss various aspects of our work.
What has been the highlight of the internship for you?
My personal highlights were the social events organised by SENSE. I enjoyed meeting the other interns and hearing about their experiences. It was also interesting to listen to the PhD students to get some advice and a better idea in general of what it is like to do a PhD.
How has doing this internship changed your plans or thoughts about your future career?
Before this internship I had thought of a career in Climate Science as an option but would have been uncomfortable committing to e.g., a PhD or even a Masters in the field, as I had no idea of what it would be like, coming from a Physics background. After doing this internship I could definitely imagine working in Climate Science in the future and it confirmed that I would enjoy working in a research environment.
I am studying for a BSc in Environmental Science at the University of Leeds.
Tell us a bit about the project you have been working on this summer?
The project aims to trial monitoring and quantification methods on natural floods management practices (NFM’s) implemented at Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire. NFM’s implemented include leaky dams, pond creation and afforestation, which aim to combat the economic and environmental issues of sediment accumulation and flooding in the Skell valley river catchment.
A wide variety of monitoring and quantification methods were involved in investigating these NFM’s. I hope to contribute to the ongoing research at the Sorby Fluid Dynamics Laboratory to help answer and prove some of the many questions surrounding this project including; ‘ are heavy rainfall events causing increased sediment inputs into the river Skell? ‘ and ‘ has the implementation of NFM’s substantially quantities of precipitation and subsequently slowing the flow of water into the river Skell across the catchment ‘. All with the end goal of helping to preserve fountains abbey and resolve issues for shareholders involved in the Skell valley catchment.
Large Leaky dams implemented on the River Skell.
Small leaky dam on the River Skell.
What new skills have you learned while doing this internship?
I learned various skills that were both specialised to the field of data science and practical transferable skills for any workplace. I developed various specialised data science skills. Including learning to use software to process data, where I used MeshLab to quantify LiDAR models that I conducted in the field. I took part in implemented and manging various monitoring methods including; Turbidity and level sensors, weather stations, cameras, level weather stations and pump and volunteer sampling. I did a A2 CofC course so I could be qualified to fly unmanned aerial vehicles to produce repeat photogrammetric models of NFM’s. This will be very useful for future research possibilities as UAV’s are increasingly used in data science. The practical skills I further developed included; communicating with shareholders, extensive planning, time management and teamwork on a large project with multiple organisations operating on a tight time frame.
LiDAR model of part of the River Skell.
How have you found working with your research team?
I found working with my supervisor Dave and his colleagues Gareth and Helena in the Sorby Fluid Dynamics ab, as well as the wider Skell Valley Project, to be thoroughly insightful and informative. They were all generous with their time and knowledge and answered any question I asked about the project and industry as a whole. I am immensely appreciative to have had the opportunity to work alongside these incredibly skilled professionals doing great work.
What has been the highlight of the internship for you?
The highlight of the internship was an interdisplinary meeting at fountains abbey with a wide variety of professionals working within the Skell valley project, which opened my eyes both the extend of the project and also how important data science is to large environmental management projects.
Stream gauge in a sediment filled river.
How has doing this internship changed your plans or thoughts about your future career?
This placement has led me to respect and understand how challenging research projects can be. Nonetheless I would consider taking on one in the future and I am definitely interested in pursuing a MscR after my BSc.
Stephanie and 3 others in a field conducting research.
What are you studying?
I am currently studying for a BSc in Environmental Science at The Open University, as a distance-learning student. I will be starting my fourth and final year in October 2023.
Tell us a bit about the project you have been working on this summer?
My project investigated how particulate organic carbon (POC) in the Southern Ocean sinks through the water to add to ocean carbon storage, via phytoplankton photosynthesis. This involved analysing in-situ data on particles produced by the phytoplankton that promote carbon sinking to the deep ocean. I also used chlorophyll data from the ESA Ocean Colour satellite dataset, to help answer my main question of how the whole process was affected by nutrient availability in the water. The findings will hopefully have implications for researchers involved in the CUSTARD project, who are investigating seasonal changes in Southern Ocean carbon storage.
What new skills have you learned while doing this internship?
During the internship, my IT and data analysis skills definitely improved, such as learning about and using Linux operating systems, and coding using a Python environment – something which I had never used before. I have developed my presentation skills, by presenting to other placement students and research scientists at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) where I was based, which also taught me how to target a talk to different audiences with different knowledge bases. The soft skills I have learned and used involved problem-solving, time management and building work relationships, by communicating with my supervisors and speaking to other people in the office. I also developed a good working day routine to make the most of my time, which is some helpful personal insight I will use in future.
Map of 8 day mean chlorophyll from December 2019-January 2020 covering the Antarctic Peninsula and South America. There are high concentrations along the coastlines.
Plot of chlorophyll levels against the depth (down to 200 m).
How have you found working with your research team?
From the outset and throughout the internship, my supervisors Alice and Chelsey were incredibly welcoming and attentive to any questions I had (which, for the first week, were mainly about how to find my way around the NOC building!). They offered me many opportunities to attend talks, speak to people, get involved with data collection and public engagement, and generally gain a huge amount of insight into the academic industry, for which I am very grateful. I massively appreciated their consistent time and support, particularly when they were both busy with their own work, and it was inspiring to work with and learn from them.
What has been the highlight of the internship for you?
The highlight was definitely my fifth week, where I presented to the other REP interns in Edinburgh and Leeds online, and then to 20 or so researchers at NOC later that week. It was fantastic to see what the other interns had been working on, and grow in confidence when presenting to researchers who are experts in their fields.
How has doing this internship changed your plans or thoughts about your future career?
The internship has reaffirmed to me that I want to pursue a career in earth science research, as I found the whole project process very interesting. It has also highlighted the potential challenges that arise with it, which I am glad to be aware of. I definitely plan to conduct a PhD research project, and will likely study for a masters in oceanography or similar first.
The SENSE CDT is running a training course on ‘the Cryosphere and Solid Earth’ from 11 – 15 March, in person, at the University of Leeds. We are delighted to be able to invite up to 10 UK based PhD students to apply to attend.
Successful applicants will join the NERC SENSE CDT PhD students on the training, providing an excellent opportunity for PhD students across the UK to network. The SENSE CDT is on satellite data in environmental science, from which most of the examples will be taken.
The teaching week is a mixture of theory followed by practical exercises, keynote speakers, and transferable skills development. At the end of the week, attendees are placed into groups and work on a group project to work, which will require them to apply the skills they have gained earlier in the week. The groups will present their work back to a small panel of experts in the field on the Friday.
Schedule
Time
am
pm
Mon
Overview of EO of the cryosphere Sea ice EO techniques Sea ice freeboard practical
Sea ice freeboard practical contd. Keynote: Advances in cryosphere research over the last 30 years
Tues
Surface elevation change from altimetry Ice Velocity theory & practical
Ice velocity practical contd Keynote talk: Advances in cryosphere research over the last 30 years, Andrew Fleming, BAS
Wed
Overview of EO for volcanoes and earthquakes InSAR for volcanoes and earthquakes Visible Earthquakes
Interseismic practical work Keynote talk: 30 years of advances in tectonics, Prof Andy Hooper
Thurs
Volcanoes & EO science talk Introduction to group work activity
Group work
Fri
Group work
Group work presentations
Details
The course is free to successful applicants and overnight accommodation will be provided, Monday – Thursday. However, attendees will need to book their own travel and cover their travel and subsistence costs whilst on the course. Tea, coffee and refreshments will be provided during morning and afternoon breaks.
Students will be required to bring their own laptops. Information will be given prior to the training on any software downloads required.
The training will take place, at the University of Leeds, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Fairbairn House, 71-75 Clarendon Rd, Woodhouse, Leeds LS2 9PH.
Attendees are expected to attend all sessions.
Pre-requisites
Applicants must be:
in the first or second year of their PhD studies
studying in an associated field, with a strong mathematical and computing background
able to demonstrate that the training is relevant to their PhD research and is unavailable at their home institution.
How to apply
Applicants need to complete the following form https://forms.gle/vDbmE6gEzyZswPjn6
The deadline for applications is 1 January 2024 (23:59)
Successful applicants will be informed shortly afterwards.
For informal enquiries please contact eo_cdt@leeds.ac.uk
The SENSE Centre for Doctoral Training would like to invite you to a one day symposium involving students, staff and partners of the centre.
The purpose of the event will be: · To showcase the work in Earth Observation and environmental science being done by the SENSE Centre for Doctoral Training · Explore opportunities for collaboration within the centre. · Network with students, companies, academics and other staff working within the area of EO · Explore future directions for research in Earth Observation and environmental science
Attendance at this event is free however limited to two attendees per organisation.
The SENSE CDT is running a training course for ‘Machine Learning and AI’ from 4 – 7 March 2024, in person, at the University of Leeds. We are delighted to be able to offer places for up to 10 UK based PhD students to attend.
Successful applicants will join the NERC SENSE CDT PhD students on the training, providing an excellent opportunity for PhD students across the UK to network. The SENSE CDT is on satellite data in environmental science, from which most of the examples will be taken.
The teaching week is a mixture of theory followed by practical exercises, keynote speakers, and transferable skills development.
Schedule
am
pm
Mon
Machine Learning AI techniques practical: classification of images, textural description
AI techniques practical: contd Keynote: New directions of AI, Prof David Hogg
Tues
Agent-based models Introduction to Urban Analytics Urban systems machine learning practical 1/2
Urban systems machine learning practical 2/2 “Dos and Don’ts of presenting”, Prof Jurgen Neuberg
Wed
The role of ATI and overview of LIDA Unsupervised classification of clouds lecture & practical
Unsupervised classification of clouds summary Keynote: Using science to influence policy, Dr Cat Scott
Thurs
Scientific Machine Learning Using machine learning in EO Alan Turing Institute lecture
Details
The course is free to successful applicants and overnight accommodation will be provided, Monday – Wednesday. However, attendees will need to book their own travel and cover their travel and subsistence costs whilst on the course. Tea, coffee and refreshments will be provided during morning and afternoon breaks.
Students will be required to bring their own laptops. Information will be given prior to the training on any software downloads required.
The training will take place, at the University of Leeds, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Fairbairn House, 71-75 Clarendon Rd, Woodhouse, Leeds LS2 9PH.
Attendees are expected to attend all sessions.
Pre-requisites
Applicants must be:
in the first or second year of their PhD studies
studying in an associated field, with a strong mathematical and computing background
able to demonstrate that the training is relevant to their PhD research and is unavailable at their home institution.
