Steffen Fritz

Dr. Steffen Fritz is Deputy Program Director of the Ecosystem Services and Management (ESM) Program and the Leader of the Earth Observation Systems (EOS) Group at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He joined IIASA in 2007, and since then he has become the initiator and driving force behind the Geo-Wiki.org, a global land cover validation tool that aims to investigate and reduce the uncertainties in global land cover data using crowdsourcing. Dr. Fritz is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded ''CrowdLand'' and H2020 funded LandSense and WeObserve projects, as well as many others. Dr. Fritz studied physics and geography at the University of Tubingen, Germany and in 1996, he received a Master of Science degree in Geographical Information for Development from the University of Durham, UK. Thereafter, he was awarded a scholarship by the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK, where he completed his PhD on how to map perceptions of wild land. He then undertook a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Italy in 2002. During this time, he worked on land cover with a primary task to mosaic, harmonize and produce the Global Land Cover 2000 database. His second post at the JRC was on the development of new methods for crop area estimations.