4 Suggested project topics
Here we list some ideas for your Proseminar in Geocomputation and Earth Observation projects: questions to be answered and patterns to be verified with data. These are suggestions for project proposals, which you can work on directly or take as inspiration to define your own. Naturally, this list is not exhaustive and we encourage you to come up with a project that truly peeks your interest. The datasets listed below serve just a starting point and you may need to gather more data for your project implementation.
| Project | Datasets |
|---|---|
| Demo: Spatio-temporal downscaling of temperature and VPD |
WATCH-WFDEI WorldClim FLUXNET2015 |
| Homogenized time series of global mean CO2 and temperature, from the Pleistocene to 2100. | Mauna Loa CO2 trends Corrected EPICA Dome C CO2 record (Bereiter et al. 2015) RCP standard forcing |
| Relationship between vegetation height and topography | Global Tree Heigh (Simard et al.) Global Topographic Index |
| Relationship between growing season length and vegetation biomass | Global Above-ground Biomass (Liu et al. 2015) Climate Change Initiative Biomass |
| Latitudinal gradients of the CO2 seasonal amplitude | In-Situ Measurements from Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases |
| Global patterns in the difference between land surface and air temperatures | Global Land Surface and Air Temperature (ICDC) |
| Study of soil-climate relationships | WorldClim SoilGrids Regridded HWSD |
| Current analogue places for the future (2100) climate of Bern, under various emission scenarios | CMIP6 climate projections Copernicus |
| Trends in the longest rain-free period per year, in a specific location (e.g. Bern) | rnoaa R package MeteoSchweiz online GUI |
| Data imputation in the global forest age dataset for missing values in Australia | Global Forest Age Dataset |
| Correlation of runoff coefficient (Q/P) and global topographic index and/or soil data | G-RUN: Global Runoff Reconstruction Global Topographic Index SoilGrids |
| Prediction of future Köppen-Geiger climate classification map based on future climate (2100) and comparison of a deterministic classification implementation and a modeling approach that approximates it | CMIP6 |
| Comparison of biomass storage in protected areas and outside, within similar climates | Global above-ground biomass carbon World Database on Protected Areas |
| Patterns in irrigation areas and land surface temperature | Global map of Irrigation Areas Global Land Surface Temperature (IDCD) |
| Analysing the Budyko curve (AET/P vs. PET/P), using gridded data and catchment and/or surface characteristics | GLEAM HydroBASINS |