Pierre Cothereau wins the Esri Young Scholars Award 2016
Awards
Pierre Cothereau, a Master’s student in the Department of Environmental Systems Science (D-USYS), has won the Esri Young Scholars Award 2016 for his Master’s thesis “Vertical Vegetation Structure Classifier (VVSC): A novel tool for ArcGIS” and with it the opportunity to present his work to an audience of experts from all over the world.
Pierre Cothereau completed his Master’s thesis at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), where he worked with the latest remote sensing technology, such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), exploring ways to make this technology readily accessible to people with no specialist knowledge of geographic information systems (GIS) or remote sensing. This is what led him to develop the “Vertical Vegetation Structure Classifier” (VVSC), a toolbox for the mapping platform ArcGIS that classifies the (woody) vegetation in a selected region into user-defined height classes. This 3D information can then be combined with other data on the ecosystem’s properties, such as land use or climate, in order to analyse features such as the structural networks within the landscape in 3D, for example.
The Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) is an international company based in California and with more than 90 branches worldwide that develops GIS software, web GIS and geodatabase management applications. It has sought out candidates for the external pageEsri Young Scholars Awardcall_made every year since 2012 through a competition which is open to university students anywhere in the world who excel in the field of geodata. The winners are invited to the Esri User Conference in San Diego, where they can present their work to industry specialists from every corner of the globe. We would like to congratulate Pierre on this outstanding achievement.
More information on the Master thesis may be found on the external pageWSL websitecall_made