Prof. Dr. Joachim Hil

Biography and Expertise

Prof. J. Hill is head of the Remote Sensing Department at the Faculty of Geography/Geosciences of the University of Trier, Germany.
He holds a Ph.D. degree (Dr. rer.nat., 1992), with a thesis on the use of multi-temporal satellite data for land cover mapping.
In 1993, he acquired his Habilitation from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, with a study on the use of hyper- and multispectral remote sensing systems for mapping and monitoring land degradation and soil erosion phenomena in Mediterranean ecosystems.
Since 1994, he is head of the Remote Sensing Department of the University of Trier.
In 1996 he has been offered a Chair at University of Bonn. Prof. Hill was Project Scientist at the University of Trier (1983-1984).
From 1984-1987 he held a Ph.D. grant from the European Commission (DG XII) and worked at the Joint Research Centre at Ispra, Italy.
From 1987 to 1994, he was Senior Scientist at the Institute for Remote Sensing Applications of the JRC where, from 1992-1994, he was head of the "Mediterranean Ecosystem Monitoring" sector in IRSA's Environmental Mapping and Monitoring Unit.
In 1992 he organised a EUROCOURSE on imaging spectrometry (lectures published as EUROCOURSES in Remote Sensing, vol. 2, see references), and in 1994 he conceptualised a EU-Workshop on "Remote Sensing for Land Degradation and Desertification Monitoring in the Mediterranean Basin. State of the Art and Future Research" which was held in Valencia (June 1994, see also list of references).

Numerous research contracts have been obtained from several institutions (German Ministry for Research and Technology BMFT, Federal Ministry for Environment and Forest of the Federal State of Rheinland-Pfalz, German Aerospace Research Establishment (DLR), German Agency for Space Affairs (DARA), Joint Research Centre of the European Communities (JRC) at Ispra (Italy), the German-Israeli Foundation for Research and Technical Development (GIF), and the SPOT VEGETATION Programme.

Currently Prof. J. Hill is scientific coordinator of the DeMon-2 Project (Satellite Monitoring of Desertification in the Mediterranean, funded in the Environment & Climate Programme of the European Commission, DG XII) which involves 5 additional European Partners; he was involved in the International Conference on Mediterranean Desertification, Crete, 28-31 Nov 1996.

Prof. J. Hill holds more than 60 publications. He acted as principal investigator in the EISAC 89 (GER-II) and MAC EUROPE 91 (AVIRIS) hyperspectral data collection campaigns, and recently coordinated field and laboratory work for DAIS 7915-flight campaigns in Spain and Israel. He worked extensively on operational pre-processing methods required for the analysis of extended time series, and the analysis of imaging spectrometry and multi-temporal satellite data for mapping land surface conditions and monitoring the dynamic behaviour of terrestrial ecosystems in various study sites, and agriculture and forestry.

J. Hill acts as referee for international scientific journals, such as the International Journal of Remote Sensing, and Remote Sensing of Environment.
Major scientific experiences are in the fields of image processing, sensor calibration, ecological applications, forestry and agriculture using remote sensing data in the optical domain.
Present research is primarily focused on the use of hyperspectral lab-, field- and airborne data for ecological applications in drylands, soil condition assessments and vegetation monitoring.