Monitoring ecosystem change and dynamics
Research
My research utilizes multisensor time series from the Sentinel-2 and Landsat missions to monitor ecosystem change and vegetation dynamics through space and time. I am addressing various environmental challenges related to global change, including woody plant encroachment, wildfire impacts, and post-fire vegetation recovery in Mediterranean landscapes. Furthermore, I am studying how changes in climate patterns and climate extremes such as droughts, affect the vitality of grassland systems in Central Europe.
Visit the webmap visualizations illustrating the 👉impacts of the 2018 drought on the lowland grasslands of northeastern Germany.
Selected publications
Okujeni, A., Kowalski, K., Lewińska, K.E., Schneidereit, S., & Hostert, P. (2024). Multidecadal grassland fractional cover time series retrieval for Germany from the Landsat and Sentinel-2 archives. Remote Sensing of Environment, 302, 113980. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2023.113980
Kowalski, K., Okujeni, A., Brell, M., & Hostert, P. (2022). Quantifying drought effects in Central European grasslands through regression-based unmixing of intra-annual Sentinel-2 time series. Remote Sensing of Environment, 268, 112781.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2021.112781
Viana-Soto, A., Okujeni, A., Pflugmacher, D., GarcÃa, M., Aguado, I., & Hostert, P. (2022). Quantifying post-fire shifts in woody-vegetation cover composition in Mediterranean pine forests using Landsat time series and regression-based unmixing. Remote Sensing of Environment, 281, 113239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2022.113239
Suess, S., van der Linden, S., Okujeni, A., Griffiths, P., Leitão, P.J., Schwieder, M., & Hostert, P. (2018). Characterizing 32 years of shrub cover dynamics in southern Portugal using annual Landsat composites and machine learning regression modeling. Remote Sensing of Environment, 219, 353-364. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2018.10.004
