Student Bio
Frederic Brieger is a first-year doctoral student in geography of environmental change at Carleton University in Ottawa. He is passionate about quantifying environmental change in permafrost landscapes using remote sensing methods. He graduated with a master’s degree in geosciences in 2019 at University of Potsdam. His interest for polar systems began in the second year of his master studies, when he attended lectures on permafrost landscapes conducted by researchers from the Alfred-Wegener-Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar Research Potsdam (AWI). Since then he is fascinated by polar environments and especially the detection and quantification of dynamic surface processes triggered by climate change. During his internship he joined the AWIs research section Polar Terrestrial Environmental Systems and studied the distribution of forest stands in the tundra-taiga ecotone. His strong background in remote sensing lead to a position as a student associate during the planning and execution of two month of field work to remote study sites in northeastern Siberia. There, he collected multispectral optical data for his master thesis using consumer-grade quadcopters to reconstruct three-dimensional surface models of treeline forests. The implemented processing pipeline included structure-from-motion multiview-stereo techniques, a semi-automated tree detection and the calculation of biophysical forest metrics to characterize the stand properties and structure. The findings of his master’s thesis were published in remote sensing. For his PhD project he will study the impacts of climate change on the sensible permafrost environments in the Yukon, but also assess risk related to thaw-induced infrastructure damage using remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS). The project is supervised by Assoc. Prof. Shawn Kenny (Carleton University, PermafrostNet) and Assoc. Prof. Murray Richardson (Carleton University).