Welcome to our Project Hompage
In the former military training area, Kyritz-Ruppiner Heide, the project NaTec - KRH aims to bring together biodiversity research and habitat management practice, in order to provide knowledge and technologies for nature conservation and ecological restoration. Today, one of the largest contiguous European heath landscapes can be found here. The project observes dry heathland areas by satellite, airplane and drone sensors until 2023, to understand ecological processes and helps to maintain large undisturbed ecosystems. Parallel, species and habitats are mapped on the ground and correlated with the aerial photographs. An interdisciplinary framework is established between the nature foundation Heinz Sielmann Stiftung, the German Research Centre for Geoscience, vegetation ecologists at Ecostrat and the engineering office Riemann Produktdesign, connecting the potential landscape preservation and development with recent ecological knowledge and management technologies.
Latest advancements are regularly communicated via this webpage and publications. In addition to the current project status, we promote knowledge to different topics related to our work with nature and invite everyone to contact us, gladly for a meeting in the heather itself.
The project was selected as part of the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam GFZ to be presented at Woche der Umwelt that is organized by the Bundespräsident Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU) from 10 - 11 June 2021 as a digital event.
NaTec -KRH is part of the Essential Variables workflows developed in GEOEssential. We provide spatial biodiversity indicators as part of Earth Observation Networks at the National and European level.
News Archive
Fire Monitoring
May 1st, 2020
Change detection of controlled burning from drone records
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Spatiotemporal Patterns
January 6th, 2020
Drone monitoring reveals seasonal phenological variations and regrowth patterns & species recovery after heathland mowing
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Heath Flowering
August 15th, 2019
The Flowering Phenology of Heathland is spatially mapped. See the purple facet of the Calluna landscape and discover our findings in a recent research article
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Habitat Mapping
May 15th, 2019
A novel procedure was developed to map Habitat Type Probabilities on the basis of Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite time series
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Drone Monitoring
November 15th, 2018
Algorithms are developed to map flower and fruit proportions per plant unit in 2017 and drought stress 2018 affecting individual Calluna plants
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Field Research
August 1st, 2018
The heathland database is continually growing. (see recent data catalogue) Research hypotheses are elaborated and implemented into global biodiversity policy goals
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Habitat Monitoring
June 20th, 2018
Over the whole phenological season, a comprehensive species list is collected in the field and described as potential bioindicator candidates.
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Field Season 2018
March 20th, 2018
The new field season has started: First drone flights are realized to map heathland status after winter season and after mowing management.
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Data Analysis
December 1st, 2017
During winter time the hot phase of data processing, anaylsis and hypothesis testing is conducted. First impressive results could be derived for the UAV mapping of individual Calluna plant heights and phenology characteristics.
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Mowing Machine Concept
November 15th, 2017
A 3dimensional construction model of the semi automatetd and UAV controlled heath and small tree removing machine is realized. Single parts can now be visually inspected and discussed for the construction phase
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Data Sampling 2017
October 1st, 2017
The field data collection is completed for the full vegetation period 2017. Vegetation samples as well as remote sensing imagery are collected at various scales
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