In the framework of the EU H2020 project ECoLaSS Evolution  of Copernicus Land Services based on Sentinel data, the Research Laboratory in Environmetrics and Geomatics of the Earth and Life Institute in Université catholique de Louvain, seeks qualified and highly motivated candidates to join its research team for 

A post-doc fellowship in agriculture remote sensing exploiting the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 time series (12 months)

Job description: The successful applicant will join in our laboratory a motivated team of young researchers in charge of methodological developments exploiting the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 time series for monitoring agriculture in Europe and in Africa.  

The post-doc fellow will be also part of the consortium team of the European project H2020 ECoLaSS in close interaction with the R&D experts of 4 French, German and Austrian private partners (https://www.ecolass.eu/).  This European remote sensing project aims to develop new agricultural and environmental land applications based on the exploitation of the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites for the evolution of Copernicus Land services. Within this research project, the research fellow will develop and validate methods related to advanced crop mapping, agricultural practices monitoring and food security alert system in various study areas distributed in Europe, South Africa, and Mali. 

The new research fellow will be responsible of:

• the remote sensing research building on the Sen2-Agri system (http://www.esa-sen2agri.org/) to further develop processing chains delivering agriculture-related products based on the continuous fluxes of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 time series. The proposed approach will be demonstrated over several ECoLaSS sites distributed in Europe.
• the extension of the developed methods to Mali and South Africa sites through JECAM partners;
• the analysis of products timeliness and uncertainty with regards to forthcoming operational context,
• the lab contribution to the ECoLaSS under the coordination of the H2020 project leader including the reports and presentations on the work progress to the project steering committee.

 
The post-doc fellow will work in close interactions with the different research projects in agriculture remote sensing in the lab and supervised by the laboratory head.  
 
Qualifications: The applicant will be:

a PhD holder in remote sensing or equivalent eligible for a post-doc fellowship;

graduated as bioengineer, agriculture engineering or equivalent; - fluent in written / spoken English and possibly in French;

motivated to carry out research activities in agriculture remote sensing;

ready to actively contribute to collaborative research and international teams.

Additional experiences in agriculture monitoring, agriculture fieldwork experiences, advanced image processing and Python or R programming are most welcomed.
 
Application: The interested candidates are invited to send a curriculum vitae and a motivation letter by email to Pascale Thiran (pascale.thiran@uclouvain.be with cc: pierre.defourny@uclouvain.be ) as soon as possible and not later than the 28 April 2019 to

Pr. Pierre Defourny, UCLouvain \ ELIe_Geomatics, Croix du Sud, 2 bte L5.07.16 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)