The annual UNIGIS International Academic Excellence Prize, initiated in 2008, is awarded to UNIGIS students having submitted the best MSc theses (or paper) during the previous academic year, accepted for graduation at one of the UNIGIS partner universities worldwide.
This year the competition was very tight with excellent high quality MSc theses being considered by the UNIGIS International Association Review Board. In the end, the panel and board decided to make five awards: The winner of the Academic Excellence Prize 2020 is Lindsay Hennes from University of Southern California. Her outstanding Master Thesis “Increase in Surface Temperature and Deep Layer Nitrate in the California Current: A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Four-Dimensional Hydrographic Data” was unanimously nominated for the first place.
For the first time in the history of this prize, four students were finishing as shared second place:
- Alexandre Dargains Auricchio de Oliveira, UNIGIS Portugal: “A GIS approach to sustainable livestock planning from carbon dynamics analysis: a case study of a cattle ranch in Serra da Mantiqueira (Brazil)”
- Olivia Alexandra Ortner, UNIGIS Salzburg: „Estimating the benefit of landscape metrics in a Maxent model“ – Experimental application of landscape metrics surfaces at different scales
- Charles Thompson, UNIGIS UK: “Spatial-temporal accessibility of sport facilities in the City of Dundee, Scotland”
- Sascha Woditsch, UNIGIS Salzburg: „Classification of multi-spectral and multi-temporal
satellite images using deep learning LSTM networks“ – Agricultural crop prediction of Sentinel 2 images
Congratulations to all winners!