Remote Sensing Research Group
Department of Natural Sciences
Faculty of Science & Engineering
Manchester Metropolitan University
Group members & Collaborators
Group Leader
Associate Professor in Earth Observation & GIS, MMU
Elias is a Remote Sensing and GIS scientist with a Master’s degree in GIS (University College London) and a PhD in Geography (King’s College London). Previously, he worked as a researcher or a lecturer in other institutions, such as the CSIRO (Australia), Royal Holloway, King’s College London, CGIAR/CIAT (Colombia), the University of Valencia (Spain) and the University of the Aegean (Greece). He has received funds for undertaking research in Europe, Africa, Australia and South America. His research interests include mapping, monitoring and modelling of land use/cover change with Earth observation data and GIS, and land degradation and desertification in African and Mediterranean environments.
Dr Christina Karakizi
Marie S. Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, MMU
Christina is a Surveying Engineer with an MSc in Geoinformatics and a PhD in Remote Sensing. Her Thesis was on detailed land cover & crop type mapping from multitemporal satellite data using state-of-the-art machine learning methodologies. She recently completed her post-doc as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (SAV-EO project) related with mapping and monitoring woody vegetation cover in South African savannahs. Christina has participated in numerous projects and has collaborated with several companies and organizations, such as the Hellenic Cadastre PLC for the production and verification of Copernicus products (CORINE LC 2018, HRL's 2015, Urban Atlas2012).
Caroline Rothschild
PhD Candidate, MMU
Caroline is a PhD student at MMU working on the quantification of land use change impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services across the Peak District National Park. Her research uses freely available satellite imagery and Google Earth Engine to assess multi-temporal change in a temperate region characterised by mixed agricultural, recreational and conservation activities. She is currently investigating the environmental drivers of local biodiversity loss and ecosystem service change using positive deviance analysis.
Emer. Prof Adolfo Calvo-Cases
Emer. Professor of Physical Geography, University of Valencia
Adolfo is a geomorphologist, with research interests in the field of hillslope forms and processes, mainly in soil erosion and land degradation in semiarid areas.
He has decades of experience in hillslope runoff monitoring and experimentation, and has recently incorporated the detailed mapping of hillslope erosional features by means of UAV imagery and SfM-MVS stereo techniques.
Emeritus Prof Steve Hoon
Emeritus Professor of Applied Science, MMU
Steve's research focuses upon understanding carbon cycling and soil fertility in biologically crusted dryland soils, particularly Kalahari Sand soils covered in biological soil crusts (BSC). He studies both physical and biological conditions and processes in the surface and near surface by in situ and laboratory based microcosm techniques. He has achieved important advances in understanding the association and function of
bacterial and fungal species in the surface and sub-surface employing genetic analysis, most recently funded by the Leverhulme Foundation.
Dr Yannis Kougkoulos
Senior Lecturer, American College of Greece (Deree)
Yannis holds a PhD (Earth Science - MMU), and two Masters degrees (Geography - Pantheon Sorbonne University; Risk Management - Arts et Métiers ParisTech).
His main research focuses on natural disaster modelling and analysis using numerous methods ranging from Remote Sensing to Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis and GIS.
He is currently a Senior Lecturer in GIS at the American College of Greece (Deree).
Iestyn uses remotely sensed data (derived from satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles) to link climate, Earth Surface processes, and natural hazards. He has particular interest in climatic and environmental changes that span the present, extending from the recent past into the near future. His work has focused on glaciers, peatlands, soil erosion, flooding, deltas and volcanoes.
Dr Eva Arnau-Rosalen
Marie S. Curie Postdoctoral Scientist, MMU
Eva is an eco-hydro-geomorphologist, highly skilled in lab and field techniques. She is currently an EU Marie Sklodowska Curie postdoctoral scientist on the PantEOn project which aims to produce a multi-scale Earth Observation indicator system for land degradation assessment of transitional Mediterranean climates.
Dr Tom Higginbottom
Research Scientist
at Airbus Defence & Space Ltd
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Tom is a broad-ranging remote sensing scientist with interests in monitoring environmental change and open software development. He is currently a research scientist at Airbus.
Dr Joana Borges
Ecologist, MMU
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Joana completed her PhD at MMU studying the eastern black rhino population in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA), specifically the drivers behind its low numbers. She investigated black rhino feeding ecology by determining the diet composition as well as looking at the long-term vegetation changes from the 1980s until today, using remote sensing data from different satellites. Additionally, she studied the genetic diversity of the rhino population in the NCA which hasn’t been investigated before.
Dr Anthony Cizek
Landscape Ecologist, MMU
Anthony has an MSc in Conservation Biology from the FitzPatrick Institute, University of Cape Town, and recently completed a PhD (Edge Hill University) describing the complexity of spatial and temporal patterns in leaf phenology across African savanna landscapes. He is a Zimbabwean with a broad interest in African conservation management, and, specifically, how to employ remote sensing to quantify vegetation complexity and structural, floristic and functional diversity in the mega-diverse Zambezian Region of south-central Africa. He is currently working on a project to assess elephant impacts on vegetation and birds in Gonarezhou National Park, Zimbabwe.
Dr Ángel Marqués Mateu
Assoc. Professor in GIS, Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Spain
Ángel is a Geomatics Engineer with a Marter's degree in Geomatics Engineering, a PhD in Geographical Information Science and a BSc degree in Agricultural Engineering. His research interests include soil mapping, colorimetry, digital image processing, computer programming and 3D modeling. He is a senior lecturer at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) in Spain, where he teaches courses on Advanced Geographical Information Systems and Programming, and coordinates the course 'Programming for Geospatial Applications. Ángel is also a member of the Centre for Irrigation Studies of Valencia (CVER) where he has participated in several research projects related to soil science and environmental mapping.
Antonis Korkofigkas
PhD Candidate
National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)
Antonis is a PhD candidate in Deep Learning at the Artificial Intelligence and Learning Systems Laboratory Lab of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NTUA. He has participated in EU and state research projects as part of the Institute for the Management of Information Systems of the Athena Research Center. He has worked as an iOS Lead Developer at multiple startups, and helped build web crawling and spatial big data systems. He is currently transitioning into the area of Deep Learning through his postgraduate studies. He holds an engineering diploma from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NTUA.
Dr Carlos Bedson
Spatial Ecologist, Natural England
Carlos completed his PhD studying the environmental associations of mammal populations in the Peak District, England. His research compared species occurrence data with climate, topography and landcover variables. He used regression and decision tree learning approaches to predict mammal distributions under current and future climate scenarios. He also investigated the influence of different land uses and habitat restoration on mammal densities. Carlos has considerable experience of peatland ecosystem ecology, from both ground-based studies and remote sensing sources.
Lucy Millington
PhD Candidate, MMU
Lucy is a PhD student at MMU researching the habitat associations of primates in Peru across sites with varying levels of anthropogenic disturbance. By combining traditional ground surveys with thermal UAV surveys, Lucy aims to develop more effective methods for monitoring arboreal primate communities in dense tropical forests. She is also using UAV-derived LiDAR data for habitat mapping, to establish which vegetation characteristics are important for primate communities in this region.
Dr Fraser Baker
Remote Sensing Scientist,​
MMU
Evidence & Data Officer, Shropshire Wildlife Trust
Fraser is a researcher interested in the use of remote sensing for ecosystem service and natural capital assessment. He is currently working on the EU PalusDemos project.
Past remote sensing projects involved the classification of urban environments, identifying biodiversity net gain opportunities on the road network, and developing EO indices to monitor change on peatland restoration sites.
Professor Giorgos Stamou
Professor in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)
Giorgos is a Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of NTUA, in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. His research interests include description logics, logic programming, fuzzy logic, neural networks, ontologies, digital archives, semantic annotation and semantic interoperability.
Dr Michael Martin
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​Michael holds a PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University which focused on glacier-volcano interactions, investigated with remote sensing satellite data. He holds a BSc (University of Mainz, Germany) and a MSc (University of Tübingen, Germany) in Geosciences. His main interests are in how glaciers and volcanoes interact before, during and after volcanically active phases and if this behaviour can be linked to the type and timing of the activity. To investigate these processes, he works with mostly freely available satellite imagery using google earth engine and GIS. He also built a training database of satellite imagery to automate feature detection on glaciers which can help in developing a satellite-based predictive tool for monitoring future eruptions.