Geoexpert, founded in the year 2003 by four researchers as a university spin-off is a civil engineering company operating in the fields of geo-hazard assessment and mitigation, forestry, hydrological engineering, geo-data processing and remote sensing services. Within the last years over 150 applied projects were carried out – mainly for governmental organizations within the EC – but also for partners in Turkey and Bulgaria. Despite of the “daily business” Geoexpert is engaged in research projects on a national level but also in EC-funded projects like DIS-ALP (Disaster Information System for Alpine Regions; Interreg 3-B) or MONITOR II (Practical use of Monitoring in Natural Disaster Management; Interreg Southeast-Europe). The contribution of GEO to ARANGE will be the elaboration of indicator systems and of linker functions between natural hazard models and forest development models and the elaboration of guidelines for an optimized usage of emote sensing data data for multifunctional forest inventories including hyperspectral imagery. Additionally, GEO will support the development of indicator-based habitat assessment schemes for the NATURA2000 sites within case study regions.
Web site: www.geoexpert.at
Persons involved:
Dr Diethard Leber
co-director (CEO) of GEO. He holds a Master and a Ph.D. in Earth Sciences and Remote Sensing from the University of Vienna, Austria. Within GEO he is engaged in the assessment, prevention and mitigation of natural hazards by the application of field methods, modeling approaches and remote sensing techniques. Hazard assessment, scenario definition and the elaboration of hazard maps are key competences. He is lecturer for “Remote Sensing Application” at the Institute for Geography/University of Graz, Austria and Lecturer for “Applied Geologic Remote Sensing and GIS” and “Natural Hazard Management” at the Department of Environmental Geology /University of Vienna, Austria. Additionally he is consultant for Airborne Remote Sensing of the Airborne Technologies GmbH, Wiener Neustadt, Austria, covering different aspects of airborne remote sensing techniques, including hyperspectral remote sensing.
Gerhard Volk
co-director (CEO) of the Geoexpert Research and Planning GmbH. He holds a Diploma in Forestry from the University of Life Sciences (BOKU), Austria. Within GEO he is especially engaged in projects dealing with geo-information integration, geo-information systems, data base services and modeling and simulation. He has developed the software packages “ELBA and ELBA+”, which are tools for snow avalanche run out modeling and software packages for modeling of debris flows in alpine catchments. Besides his engagement in the Geoexpert company he is owner and CEO of the “NIT Technisches Büro GmbH”, which is specialized on forestry and IT consulting.
