Course Setup

Readings

The first sessions of the course contain reading materials, such as peer-reviewed papers and technical reports. You will find the reading materials for the next session at the end of each session. We highlight aspects to focus upon to streamline the reading process. As an introduction to the first session, please read the following two papers:

Wulder et al. (2019): Current status of Landsat program, science, and applications
Radeloff et al. (2024): Need and vision for global medium-resolution Landsat and Sentinel-2 data products

Software

We use openly available and platform independent (Windows, Linux, MacOS) software packages throughout this course. If you use your own machine, please install the latest versions of:

R
RStudio or your preferred choice of IDE (e.g. VSCode)
QGIS v3.X
Google Earth Pro (= Desktop Version)

Data

Data for each session

We have already prepared the datasets and provide you with direct download links for each session.

Satellite archives are openly accessible

However, all data used during the course is in general openly accessible (after registration). For example, we will be working with satellite images from the Landsat and Sentinel-2 archives, which you can access (among other platforms) through the USGS Earth Explorer or ESA´s Copernicus Open Access Hub, respectively. The precourse section provides a short overview on how to access these archives by yourselves.

Data organization

It will be helpful to organize your data in such a way that you can easily access it during the course, at home, as well as across your fellow group members. One way to do this would be to use a cloud storage service. We recommend either using a service you may already use privately (e.g. Google Drive), or as HU-students use the HU-Box which you can easily sync to your local harddrive using the Seafil-client (Setup instructions). We also suggest to organize the course data in a main folder containing the subfolders either for each session or along categories such as data and code.

Setting up a project in RStudio

We recommend to create an RStudio project for all the work you do for this module. This helps you keep your data and scripts (.R- or .Rmd-files) organised.

In order to set up a new project in Rstudio:

Navigate to the tab “File” and select “New Project”
Either select “New Directory” if you do not have a folder for this module yet, or select “Existing Directory” to point towards to such an existing folder. If (1): “New Directory” > “New Project”, select a name and a location to store the folder in, and finish by “Create Project”.
Navigate to the path of the project folder on your machine
Inside the folder, create the following sub-folders: data, scripts, models, results, and figures
All scripts for each session are ideally saved into separate .R- or .Rmd-files and saved in your “scripts” folder
Please use this blueprint .Rmd-file for your weekly assignments

If you close and reopen RStudio, the last project should be reloaded automatically. If not the case, just navigate to the tab “File” and select “Open Project”.

Assignments

Each session you will practise your remote sensing skills along weekly assignments. These are described within the respective session’s subpage on this website and comprise several tasks that involve scripting in R, working with QGIS, or Google Earth Pro. In order to be eligible for writing the final exam, course participants must succesfully complete at least 75% of the assignments.

The submission format is a knitted markdown file. We have prepared a blueprint of an .Rmd-file you can use for each session. Please name the script according to your group member’s names EO_assignment_S[session-number]_name1_name2_nameX.Rmd, knit it to HTML and upload both files (.Rmd and .hmtl) to Moodle. The weekly submission deadline is Monday, 10:00am.