Barbara Koch  Barbara Koch is Professor of Remote Sensing and Landscape Information Systems at the University of Freiburg, Germany. When she took this position, she became the first female and youngest professor at the Faculty of Forest Sciences at the Albert -Ludwigs University in Freiburg. She was born in 1957 in Landshut, Germany. She studied Forest Sciences at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Germany from 1976 to 1982. She carried out her dissertation in a collaborative research project between the German Space Organization DLR Oberpfaffenhofen, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena and the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich in 1988. From 1988 to 1994 she established the working group of Remote Sensing and GIS at the Institute of Landscape Planning and Nature Conservation at the Technical University of Munich. In 1994 she was appointed as full professor of Remote Sensing and Landscape Information Systems at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg. Koch has been the Dean of Studies at the Faculty Environment and Natural Resources since October 2014. She is also a member of the Senat of the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg since October 2014. She is the Vice chairperson of the Upper Rhine Valley Cluster of Sustainability Research since 2015 and a member of advisory board of the Forest Research Institute of Baden-Württemberg since 2014. She has been a member of the advisory board of the National Park Black Forest since 2014. Koch is a member of the board of directors of “Performance Centre of Sustainability” operated by the Fraunhofer Research Institutes in Freiburg and the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg since 2014. She is also the Director of the Centre of Renewable Energy (ZEE) since 2015 and Director of the Steinbeis Centre FeLis since 2005. Earlier she was the Dean of the Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources from 2012 to 2014 and the President of the Confederation of European Foresters CEF from 2015 to 2016. She started her research career in remote sensing and geodata modelling for various forest and land use applications. The research broadened and included applied modelling for biodiversity, biomass, environmental impact, natural risk and renewable energy resource studies. She belongs to the “cutting edge” group of first international scientists who identified the potential of laser data for vegetation mapping and has carried out a number of scientific investigations and applications in this field in recent years.