DFG recognises early achievements in the geosciences

This success has two ‘fathers’: Johannes Mast is a PhD student conducting research under Professor Hannes Taubenböck at the Earth Observation Centre (EOC) of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), in close cooperation with the Chair of Global Urbanisation and Remote Sensing, a member of the Earth Observation Research Cluster at the University of Würzburg. The Würzburg chair was established in cooperation with the DLR.

Johannes Mast, together with PhD student Sara Nazari from the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Bremen and the University of Kiel, has now been awarded this year’s Bernd Rendel Prize from the German Research Foundation (DFG), each worth 3,000 euros. The pair were selected by a jury comprising members of the DFG’s geosciences review panels.

Johannes Mast conducts research into human–environment interactions, pursuing an innovative approach. He supplements remote sensing data obtained via satellite with alternative types of geodata. This is important because key processes of global change, such as urbanisation, land-use changes and climate change, are significantly shaped by social aspects of human behaviour.

Measuring urban changes using online data

To understand these, Mast investigates how social factors relating to migration can be captured using publicly available text data from social media and news articles. In doing so, he correlates the authors’ location and mobility information with the content of their text contributions. By making this connection, he is able to place physical changes to the land surface within a socio-economic context.

An example: “In many African cities, the density of tweets in newly developed neighbourhoods is significantly lower than in the established centres,” explains Johannes Mast. This suggests that digital presence in cities often lags behind their physical expansion – an indication of digital inequalities in urban transformation processes.

“The immense scale of global urbanisation calls for novel, scalable approaches. Satellite remote sensing, innovative Earth observation data and web data can make this possible,” says Professor Taubenböck. “Although combining them is highly challenging, Johannes Mast has done an excellent job in his work of profitably linking Earth observation, computer science and linguistics through multidisciplinary approaches.”

A bridge between Earth observation and web data

With its Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (CAIDAS), the Geolingual Studies research group and the Earth Observation Research Cluster, the University of Würzburg offers Johannes Mast the ideal environment for this work.

With his interdisciplinary approach, Johannes Mast thus builds a bridge between geoscientific big data from Earth observation and socio-economic big data from web data. He intends to use the prize money accompanying the Rendel Prize to attend academic conferences, with a view to disseminating his work beyond the geoscientific community.

About the recipient

Johannes Mast (33) comes from Freudenstadt in the Black Forest. He obtained a BSc in Geography from Leibniz University Hannover in 2018 and an MSc in Remote Sensing (EAGLE) from Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in 2021. Since then, he has been working at the DLR and the University of Würzburg on his PhD thesis entitled ‘Geographical migration research based on remote sensing and social media data’. This research also explores how Earth observation data from satellites and social media analyses can be combined to analyse human migration from a geographical perspective.

The prize will be awarded during the annual conference of the German Geological Society – Geological Association (DGGV), which will take place in Bochum from 20 to 24 September 2026.

Links

The Geohazards and Civil Security Department at the Remote Sensing Data Centre (DFD) of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR)

The Earth Observation Research Cluster

CAIDAS – Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science

Geolingual Studies