Luke A. Brown

It was great to be back at ESRIN today for the 7th @esa.int Sentinel-2 Validation Team meeting, presenting GROUNDED EO results and next steps, as well as celebrating 10 years of the Sentinel-2 mission.

Our new perspective on what TLS can (& can't) do in forest research www.nature.com/articles/s41... - led by Eduardo Maeda w lots of great colleagues including @kimcalders.bsky.social @emilyrlines.bsky.social @louiseterryn.bsky.social @benjaminbrede.bsky.social (apols for any I don;t have @ for)

Pleased to be in Helsinki yesterday for the @esa.int QA4EO-2 Calibration/Validation Workshop, hosted by the Finnish Meteorological Institute: earth.esa.int/eogateway/ev...

A Decade of Crisis The UK's universities are in crisis. Dave Hitchcock on how the sector became 'broken' and why it must be understood as an interdependent system.

A colleague has just shared this with me - it's a really good article from @davehitchcock.bsky.social about the crisis in UK Universities.
The situation is more dire than the public realise.
www.historyworkshop.org.uk/education/a-...
#AcademicSky

In Warsaw for the 3DForEcoTech final conference this week, and was happy to be able to share our latest work on terrestrial laser scanning of forest environments yesterday!

Realistic virtual forests for understanding forest disturbances and recovery from space Forests worldwide are undergoing large-scale and unprecedented changes in terms of structure and composition due to land use change and natural distur…

Our new perspective on the use (& misuse) of what we're calling virtual forests (rather than digital twins!), for forest change from space, led by @kimcalders.bsky.social w many great colleagues 🔭 🧪🔬 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In Vienna this week for the @esa.int Living Planet Symposium! I'll be presenting my GROUNDED EO project in the "A.01.11 Living Planet Fellowship Programme Coordination" session on Friday morning (Room 0.14). If you can't make that, I'll also have a poster up on Friday afternoon (Zone S-T).

📖Published📖

Brown et al. describe their new leaf-wood classification approach and benchmark its performance for leaf area index (LAI) and wood area index (WAI) estimation 🍃🌍 🧪 Read the article here 👇

buff.ly/H56JQ3B

Stability of biophysical products indicates can quantify the physical response of vegetation to climate variability, disturbances & regeneration. 🏆
Djamai et al. On the consistency and stability of vegetation biophysical variables retrievals from #Landsat 8/9 and #Sentinel2.
doi.org/10.1016/j.is...

A further paper out this week! This time in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social - we detail a new leaf-wood classification method for terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data, making use of co-registered near-infrared photography: besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Four(!) permanent positions are now open within our @salforduni.bsky.social Geography & Environmental Management team: 1 x Prof. and 1 x Lecturer in Physical Geography, 1 x Senior Lecturer in Geography, and 1 x Lecturer in Occupational Safety & Health. Deadline 12th June, apply at jobs.salford.ac.uk

New @esa.int GROUNDED EO results out in RSE! See the paper for a new data-driven Sentinel-2 LAI & FAPAR algorithm that reduces bias w.r.t. state-of-the-art. Based on a huge in situ database with uncertainties (>16,000 samples from 81 NEON, ICOS & TERN sites). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Sensors, scientists and sunshine. Thanks for the great Strucnet vegetation structural dynamics meeting @kimcalders.bsky.social.

Strucnet meeting organised by @kimcalders.bsky.social very much fun!

GA Higher Education geography statement - Geographical Association As the subject association for geography the Geographical Association is concerned about the funding position of many UK universities...

Our @geographicalassoc.bsky.social statement on the crisis impacting UK Higher Education Geography.

We urge universities to maintain their current capacity for geography and to capitalise on its growth in schools and relevance to the workplace and wider economy.

geography.org.uk/ga-higher-ed...

First look at some data from last week's leaf-off scanning with our new VZ-600i

Just in time for leaf-off scans with the new kit

📢 Call for Participants!
3rd Interdisciplinary Summer School on Forest Ecosystems

💰 No registration fee + full expenses covered!

Organized by four COST Actions

📍 Where: Oxford University & Wytham Woods
📅 When: 4–8 August 2025
📝 More here: bit.ly/3FWRvDp

#SummerSchool #Forest #COSTActions

I am #hiring! Do you like #lidar #data and #forests? Enjoy both computational & field work?

I am hiring a Computational and Field Senior Technician to join my UKRI FLF project team for 2 yrs, based in Cambridge, UK (not remote). More details here (closing April 7th) www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/50700/

Very happy to have taken delivery of our new RIEGL VZ-600i terrestrial laser scanner earlier this week. A huge upgrade over our ageing LMS-Z390. Now looking forward to getting out for some data collection...

Copernicus browser view showing S2A images acquired on the 14th of March 2025.

#Sentinel2 -A is back for 12 months, together with S2B and S2C !
Many thanks to #Copernicus and @esa.int, and to all those who asked for it in our petition.

Imagine being a government and having a truly world leading industry that also contributes directly and indirectly to regional and national economy, produces leaders, thinkers and workers of the future and then not supporting it. This is the result - now coming to several UK universities…

Fully funded PhD w me and @kungphil.bsky.social looking at the structure & function of urban forests in 3D using ground data, lidar, modelling, all the fun stuff. Check it out and get in touch if you're interested www.trees-dla.ac.uk/projects/qua...

Reminder about our funded PhD opportunity on dual-wavelength laser scanning for estimating chlorophyll content & vegetation health. Based at @unisouthampton.bsky.social under the IGNITE NERC DLA with supervision from Jadu Dash, Jo Nield and myself. Further details: www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Happy to share our new paper: Archetypal crop trait dynamics for enhanced retrieval of biophysical parameters from Sentinel-2 MSI

It’s out on RSE now: doi.org/10.1016/j.rs...

Reminder about our funded PhD opportunity on dual-wavelength laser scanning for estimating chlorophyll content & vegetation health. Based at @unisouthampton.bsky.social under the IGNITE NERC DLA with supervision from Jadu Dash, Jo Nield and myself. Further details: www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

From the Times Higher Education: The announcement makes it the 80th known university to announce cuts in recent years, according to an influential list compiled by the University and College Union branch at Queen Mary University of London. The milestone comes as Times Higher Education recently reported that university leaders anticipate job losses to hit 10,000 by the end of the year, as major cuts become commonplace in the sector.

Yesterday a story about 1k possible job losses in the automotive sector was top of the morning news. 10k possible job losses in HE was buried in the sector trade paper's coverage of redundancies at Sussex. Gov't & media refuse to recognise a crisis in HE. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/around-...

IMAGE AND CALIBRATION / VALIDATION SCIENTIST <strong>Wyvern </strong>is making something big. Our vision is to provide actionable intelligence from space, anywhere in the solar system. To achieve this we need to entirely reimagine how satellite ...

Wyvern Space (working on a hyperspectral constellation) has an open position for a calibration & validation scientist in Edmonton:
wyvern.rippling-ats.com/job/864009/i...

Would be happy to be added to this too!