Exciting Kick-Off of the SOS Project at Dizzying Heights

Published: Jan 13, 2025 by Stefan Geißler

Last week, our team had the privilege of hosting the kick-off meeting for our new DFG-funded research project Serverless Scientific Computing and Engineering for Earth Observation and Sustainability Research (SOS) at the stunning Umweltforschungsstation Schneefernerhaus, nestled at the flank of the iconic Zugspitze.

Image of Team during the kickoff event

The interdisciplinary project, lead by Samuel Kounev and Claudia Kuenzer, unites 20 researchers in geography, ecology, and computer science from Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt e.V., Max Planck Institute, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre and the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg to investigate current research inquiries in land cover dynamics and biodiversity:

Causalities between land surface dynamics and animal movements
Impact of climate change on global snow cover
Predict changes in biodiversity by combining Earth Observation (EO) products with animal movement data.

Furthermore we aim to lower entry barriers for geoscientist in general, developing and executing high-volume EO workflows with possibly heterogenous data sources, by providing a framework for serverless scientific computing and component-based workflow engineering. Ultimately, we want to enable sharing, reuse and composition of EO workflows while relieving domain-experts of laborious workflow deployment and resource provisioning.

We are really looking forward to this interdisciplinary project :) Stay tuned for the first results…