Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation

Rooted in mathematics, geodesy represents a highly interdisciplinary science, with applications to understanding risks to society and to developing sustainable pathways for human development. At IGG, we focus on using geodetic data for assessing climate change and monitoring the environment (including defining a global reference system), on land use management, property markets, urban planning, and ecosystem services assessment, and on developing sensor systems that aid precision agriculture and robotic systems research.

Sources of information that we analyze reach from dedicated gravity satellites such as GRACE and GRACE-FO, radar altimeters, multi- and hyperspectral remote sensing satellites, multi-GNSS, aerial, UAV- and vehicle-based sensors, and terrestrial instrumentation such as cameras and laser scanning. These geodetic data allow constructing space-time surface reconstructions at various scales that are used e.g. in sea level research, in the mapping of regional land subsidence or in plant phenology mapping, and deriving gravity field and mass change models, which in turn inform numerical simulation models. [...] read more