Over the past month, Eurosite has hosted the first two in a series of Remote Sensing webinars by the Eurosite Remote Sensing Support Group. The webinars attracted many attendees from all different corners of Europe, and even the world, making them a great success. Now the webinars can be viewed online for free.

#1 Drone potential for vegetation monitoring

The first webinar focused on the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in vegetation mapping. This quickly developing technique enables the decrease of costs of field work, and increases its accuracy accordingly. The drones and their software are nowadays quite user-friendly, even for beginners. In this first webinar, optical remote sensing data expert Lucie Kupková provided a unique opportunity to fly over subalpine and alpine vegetation in Krkonoše Mountains.

#2 An introduction to QGIS for site managers

The second webinar focused on the potential use of QGIS in the everyday tasks of a site manager. The purpose of the webinar was to give participants the confidence to jump into the world of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Even a basic proficiency in GIS can help a site manager gather and analyse available data, map certain features and communicate issues or results with other stakeholders.

By providing access to the basic terminology and some of the most useful functions, the aim of the webinar was to encourage site managers in exchanging experiences and advice, and to help better understand what options are at their disposal. A leaflet on QGIS was already developed by the Eurosite Economics and Ecosystem Services Working Group in 2019 and is available here.

Both webinar recordings can be found on the Eurosite Youtube channel.