Dr Steffen Fritz

Dr Fritz is the Deputy Programme Director of the Ecosystem Services and Management (ESM) Programme, and the Leader of the Earth Observation and Citizen Science (EOCS) Research Group. He is a senior expert in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, data interoperability, land use and land cover as well as policy related land use modelling. He is Coordinator of the H2020-funded WeObserve CSA, the LandSense Citizen Observatory and a European Research Council (ERC) grant entitled ‘Harnessing the power of crowdsourcing to improve land cover and land-use Information’. He has coordinated or been work package leader on several projects, e.g. the Austrian funded ASAP-7 LandSpotting project, the ASAP-8 FarmSupport project, the ESA-funded GEOSAF projects and European framework projects such as GEOBENE, EUROGEOSS, ENERGEO and SIGMA. Dr. Fritz is a core member of the Citizen Science Global Partnership driving the uptake of citizen science data in official data streams globally, and particularly for SDG monitoring. He started Geo-wiki.org, a global land cover validation tool based on Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing. He also participates in the GEO Working Groups on Data Sharing and Global Land Cover Validation. Dr Fritz was co- chair of the EU COST Action network: Mapping and the Citizen Sensor (2012-2016).