Do you have a passion for (big) geospatial data analysis as well as human settlements, and would you like to work in research and teaching on sustainable land use in an interdisciplinary team? Please apply at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Human settlements exist in a variety of forms, ranging from villages to metropolises, and from slums to suburbs. However, in studies of land use change, such differences are normally not recognised, as all are represented as built-up land or urban land. The Vidi project “Guiding human settlements towards sustainable development” aims to generate new data, understanding and tools to study the human settlement changes and their role in land use change processes.
The role of this PhD is to conduct innovative research on the characterization of human settlements beyond the identification of built-up areas only. The successful candidate will use a range of geospatial datasets to identify different types of human settlements, such as suburbs, peri-urban areas, slums, and urban centres. These data include remote sensing imagery of various types, but also gridded socioeconomic data, road and infrastructure networks, census and (DHS) survey data, data from social media, and potentially other sources of information. These data will be processed using statistical analysis as well as artificial intelligence algorithms for supervised classification (specifically the project aims to employ convoluted neural networks (CNN) to identify spatial patterns in human settlements). Results will be used to better understand dynamics in human settlements as well as to improve large-scale land use models for projecting land use change trajectories. Within this project an intensive collaboration with the German Aerospace Agency (DLR) - Earth Observation Centre is foreseen.