Postdoctoral fellow in Forest Remote Sensing and Climate Risk Assessment
The Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (MGeo) at Lund University is announcing a postdoctoral position within a project addressing climate-related pressures on Swedish forests, such as droughts, storms, and bark-beetle outbreaks. The project aims to develop an operational, web-based service using Landsat and Sentinel satellite observations, tree-species maps, canopy structure data, and climate indicators to provide continuous climate-risk assessments. This service will deliver drought-stress maps, a storm-exposure hazard index, and bark-beetle susceptibility signals, designed in collaboration with regional authorities and forest owners associations. The work also involves investigating spatial and temporal mechanisms linking these environmental factors using interpretable machine/deep learning models.
This position is based at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (MGeo) in Lund, Sweden. Lund University, founded in 1666, is a top-ranked global university with around 46,000 students and 8,500 staff across its campuses in Lund, Helsingborg, and Malmö.
Key qualifications:
- PhD in physical geography, remote sensing, geoinformatics, forest ecology, environmental science, or a closely related field.
- Demonstrated experience with satellite remote sensing for large-scale vegetation or forest monitoring (Landsat and/or Sentinel-1/2 time series).
- Strong proficiency in Python for geospatial data analysis and machine learning (e.g., XGBoost), including model interpretation techniques (e.g., SHAP).
- Very good oral and written proficiency in English.
- A publication record in peer-reviewed international journals.
Deadline: September 27th, 2026