Laura N. Sotomayor

How a radical experiment to bring a forest into a preschool transformed children’s health In Finland, kindergartens are exposing children to more mud, wild plants and moss - and finding changes to their health that show how crucial biodiversity is to wellbeing

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

⭐️🔭Applications open at Anton Pannekoek Institute in Amsterdam for the 7th ASPIRE program: aspire.science.uva.nl. This 2026 summer school provides astronomy research experience for talented MSc students from countries where opportunities to move into a PhD program are limited. [1/2]

My story "Gingerbread" was just published by @365tomorrows.bsky.social ✨️ you can read it for free here: 365tomorrows.com/2025/08/15/g...

'“This is a terrible idea” I said.
My sentience had arrived after the first gingerbread brick was lain.'

⛰️So happy to make it without walking and 10min faster than last year: 2:34:16 in this amazing half marathon 21.1km with 1271 metres elevation
∆ Average pace 7:23 min/km, starting with 5:50 min/km first 5km.
@pointtopinnacle #P2P #kunanyi #tassie
👉🏻🐔😌👈🏻

YESSS! After a year of hard work at ForestryAI@NIBIO, #ForestFormer3D is out 🥳!

Our new #SOTA transformer model 🔥 tackles tough 3D forest scenes with semantic + instance segmentation — all in one! 🌳🤖 Works across LiDAR sources (ground/airborne) 🚀

Check it out 👇

#SingleTree #AI #Forestry

Photo of me holding "Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years, Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times" by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

Great find charity shopping today 📚 "Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years, Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times" by Elizabeth Wayland Barber ❤️

Polar Geoengineering: A Risky Experiment That Will Not Fix Climate Change Earth’s climate is warming because we burn fossil fuels for electricity, transport, heating, and food production, and this releases greenhouse gases. The polar regions (the Arctic and Antarctic) are w...

Want to explain #polarClimate and why #Geoengineering doesn't belong there to kids? Try this excellent Frontiers for Young Minds piece by @helenmillman.bsky.social et al:

kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10....

🏌🏻‍♀️Proud to share PhD project 'Mapping Ecosystem Resilience with High-Resolution Remote Sensing Data' was selected for the
NVIDIA Academic Grant Program 👩🏻‍💻
Thanks to #NVIDIA, I’ll have 1K A100 GPU-Hours on Brev 🚀 #NVIDIAGrant #DeepLearningAlgorithms #ComputerVision #Robotics #GenerativeAI @NVIDIAAIDev

Integrating terrestrial and canopy laser scanning for comprehensive analysis of large old trees: Implications for single tree and biodiversity research Canopy laser scanning (CLS) enhances 3D measurements of large trees by lifting laser scanners into the canopy. Combining CLS with terrestrial laser scanning improves point cloud precision, reduces oc...

I like big trees and I cannot lie. Great bit of work by @kimcalders.bsky.social @louiseterryn.bsky.social and colleagues using innovative climbing and scanning approach. Stunning illustration of tree structural and biodiversity complexity zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

🌊 “The fact that 1.5 million Australians may be impacted by rising seas and coastal hazards by 2050 is shocking, even for this sea level scientist.” — Prof Matt King @deformedearth.bsky.social @antarcticsciaus.bsky.social @utas.edu.au

▶️ aappartnership.org.au/antarctic-sc...

The Atlas of Space: Behold Brilliant Maps of Constellations, Asteroids, Planets & “Everything in the Solar System Bigger Than 10km” A great deal remains to be learned about our solar system, but a great deal has already been learned about it as well. Yet huge amounts of data such as those produced by outer-space research so far ca...

The Atlas of Space: Behold Brilliant Maps of Constellations, Asteroids, Planets & “Everything in the Solar System Bigger Than 10km”

New Zealand's bold plan to save endangered animals: kill millions of invasive animals Many of New Zealand's unique birds are heading toward extinction. So the country is taking on an ambitious conservation project: eradicating the invasive species that prey on them.

New Zealand aims for Predator Free 2050 - eradication of #InvasiveAlienSpecies which harm native species (especially birds like the kiwi). It will be one of the biggest #conservation programs worldwide 🌍

#BiodiversityAction #IAS #PredatorFree2050 #EndangeredSpecies

www.npr.org/2025/09/08/n...

Five new FORWARDS-funded projects to characterise European forest disturbances kicked off — Forwards CAEFD, CE-ReDiFor, HALO-FARM, Image4Dist, TREAD

🏆🌲 Here are five more projects which were awarded #ForwardsEU grants to study the characterisation of European forest disturbances

CAEFD, CE-ReDiFor, HALO-FARM, Image4Dist, TREA: discover them in our news release 🔗 bit.ly/4m6ZpKf

@remote-sensing-slu.bsky.social @efieuropeanforest.bsky.social

Here are two of our open calls for grants, still accepting proposals 📢

The deadline for both is 21 September 2025 at 21:00 (UTC+2).

You can submit your application through this European Forest Institute page 🔗 efi.int/grants-train...

#FORWARDScalls

🌳 Looking for a last/light summer ☀️ read with a forestry twist?

The latest @singletreeeu.bsky.social newsletter is out, full of fresh updates, smart sensing, and stories from the forest!

📰 Don’t miss out: r.mailing.cesefor.com/mk/mr/sh/7nV...

📩 Subscribe now to stay in the loop!

Visible light (RGB) image of a conifer forest.

Thermal image showing two animals.

IR image zoomed in on the thermal signatures.

Preliminary results are in: Fixed-wing drones show strong potential for moose surveys.

Monitoring moose populations has been traditionally done by helicopter. Our partners at UBC are exploring if drones are a better alternative.

🔗Learn more: friresearch.ca/publications...

@irssubc.bsky.social

A riddle wrapped in a 20-year-old @nasahubble mystery…

Webb confirmed a controversial finding of Hubble’s - planet-forming disks in the early universe that are longer-lived than they should be, given the conditions in their environment. Read more: https://t.co/NVsUmuHmlf https://t.co/PYms9yaWEX

Blue Mushroom (𝘔𝘺𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘢 𝘴𝘶𝘣𝘤𝘺𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘢): Mycena is a large genus of small saprotrophic mushrooms that are rarely more than a few centimeters in width. This is a fascinating tiny fungi that has been discovered in the past couple of years by Eric Cho in Taoyuan, Taiwan.
#fungi #nature #wildlife #taiwan

Image description: A brown hawk perched on a branch with text reading: "Your photo could be the one someone’s been looking for!Got great shots on your camera roll? Why not start uploading them NOW? with a QR code link featuring imaggeo and EGU logos."

Happy World Photography Day📷!

At EGU, we truly support and encourage visual #art! We invite you to explore #imaggeo - EGU’s online open access geosciences image repository, and share your photos.

🖼️ Start uploading your images today: egu.eu/90F96B
📸 Pamela Trisolino on imaggeo.egu.eu

Applications for this exciting position close this Friday 15 August!

Few months ago but... New paper out! ⚠️🗞️

Here we used an optical flow algorithm to co-register drone-based hyperspectral imagery and RGB imagery to high accuracy 🚁📈

Big thanks to co-authors @terraluma.bsky.social @eclambda.bsky.social & Darren Turner

www.mdpi.com/2504-446X/9/...

Congratulations on this major PhD milestone! Great work.

GitHub - LNSOTOM/fvc_composition: Mapping Fractional Vegetation Cover (FVC) components by introducing a CNN-based deep learning approach for UAS imagery Mapping Fractional Vegetation Cover (FVC) components by introducing a CNN-based deep learning approach for UAS imagery - LNSOTOM/fvc_composition

If you are interested to play with the CNN-based workflow for mapping ecosystems, is available for RGB, multispectral #drone data, but also for more bands/channels such as hyperspectral inputs if required
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👇
github.com/LNSOTOM/fvc_...

Thanks to all the co-authors involved @arkolucieer.bsky.social , Darren Turner, Megan Lewis and @TejaKattenborn Feeling proud of this mission🚀🤓
[7/8]

Implementation of the Monte Carlo Dropout as Uncertainty estimation in FVC segmentation mapping 🗺️#DeepLearning #RemoteSensing
[6/8]

Cm-scale FVC maps🌱from our best CNN models predictions on 3072×3072 px UAS multispectral tiles for each site (site-specific models).
[5/8]

Model generalisation & transferability 🛰️ We tested 2 setups (A & B) to see when site-specific models beat generic ones. Expanded discussion on limitations + showed how data augmentation can boost robustness as a proof-of-concept.
[4/8]

U-Net models were trained & validated with spatial block CV, including both site-specific and generic models across all sites, to produce more realistic and transferable evaluations. Random CV inflated performance estimates by up to 28%.
[3/8]

🌱📍We tested our CNN approach at 3 AusPlots sites in Calperum Station, South Australia, each representing a different National Vegetation Information System (NVIS) vegetation type: A (low), C (medium), E (dense). Together they cover 29 ha of semi-arid landscape.
[2/8]

Mapping fractional vegetation cover in UAS RGB and multispectral imagery in semi-arid Australian ecosystems using CNN-based semantic segmentation - Landscape Ecology Context Monitoring fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is crucial for assessing ecosystem health and sustainably managing semi-arid rangelands. Field-based methods are resource-intensive, while moderate...

My PhD paper is out🤠We advance methods for mapping fractional vegetation cover using a CNN-based U-net on cm-scale UAS RGB & multispec imagery, capturing patterns in sparse, complex vegetation & enabling detailed, scalable mapping in semi-arid ecosystems.
[1/8]
doi.org/10.1007/s109...