Sophia Walther from GFZ section Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics received one of this year's Ernst Reuter Prizes. On 4 December every year, the Ernst Reuter Society honors outstanding and pioneering dissertations submitted to the Freie Universität Berlin. Each prize is endowed with 5000 euros.

The award-winning thesis is entitled "Assessment of the dynamics of terrestrial vegetation using satellite observations of greeness and sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence". Supervised by Luis Guanter, Sophia Walther used satellite data to investigate the mechanisms influencing photosynthesis of vegetation on the large-scale.

Sophia Walter studied meteorology at the FU Berlin and is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena. Her research work, carried out in Section 1.4 at the GFZ and at the Institute of Space Sciences, has already influenced the field of research, says her former supervisor Luis Guanter. (jz)