Martin Kappas

Prof. Dr. Martin Kappas earned a German Dipl.- Geography (six year running program) degree from University of Bonn, Germany in 1989 and a PhD in Environmental Sciences/Climatology from the University of Mannheim in 1993. After his PhD (“summa cum laude”) Martin started a six year running “habilitation” program at the University of Mannheim to obtain the international “venia legendi” for Geography in 1998. Since 2000 Martin has been a University Professor of Geography and the head of the Cartography, GIS and Earth Observation/Remote Sensing Section of the Georg-August University of Göttingen. His Earth Observation/Remote Sensing laboratory is a full member of EARSeL (European Association of Earth Observation/Remote Sensing Laboratories) and takes part as active member of DesertNET (Competence Network for Research to Combat Desertification). Moreover he is the Director of the Institute of Geography at the Georg-August University of Göttingen and a member of the Interdisciplinary Center for Sustainable Development (IZNE), the Center of Applied Informatics and the Göttingen International Health Network (GIHN). His research interests are broad and include topics such as landscape evaluation using techniques of Geoinformatics and ground truth data collection (e.g. field spectrometry). His main research theme is the use of Earth Observation/Remote Sensing and GIS to study land cover / land use change and dynamics. He is currently working on diverse interdisciplinary projects in Kazakhstan (grassland carbon sequestration and ecological site classification), West- and East-Africa (ecosystem services for Food Security/Sovereignty, health topics), Europe (South France, landscape degradation in the Mediterranean area) and Germany (mapping biomass potentials for future bioenergy use, funded by German Government of Lower-Saxony). In 2005 and 2009 Martin was a visiting Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). He is a reviewer for the German Science Community (DFG) and the German Humboldt foundation. Martin serves also actively inside various societies such as the German Society of Photogrammetry and Earth Observation/Remote Sensing, the Earth Observation/Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society (UK) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Since 2010 Martin is a representative for international relations of the University of Göttingen and responsible for the Erasmus-Mundus program.

Contact:

Prof. Dr. Martin Kappas

Institute of Geography, Dept. Cartography, GIS and Earth Observation/Remote Sensing, University of Göttingen, Goldschmidtstr. 5, 37077 Göttingen, Germany,
Phone number: +49 551 39 8071, Fax: +49 551 39 8020,
E-mail: mkappas@uni-goettingen.de.