University of Pisa Summer - Winter Schools & Foundation Course

Summer School on Agriculture, Forest and Environmental Geodata Statistical Analysis, Modelling and Machine Learning [SAFEST]

The international Winter School on Agriculture, Forest and Environmental geodata Statistical analysis, modelling and machine learning [SAFEST] will provide theoretical and practical teaching on the statistical methods and tools for geodata handling and analysis, with special emphasis to soil traits, crop yield or plant biomass in the agricultural, forest and other land uses under variable management and environmental conditions. Methods provided will be tailored to a wide range of scales, from plot to landscape to regional scales.

Topics in the school include:

1. use of reference databases on land cover, soil traits, and meteorological and climate data;
2. data search, download, visualization, spatial references and projections, proximal and remote sensed data, terrain analysis, graphical interface;
3. methods for covariate identification, acquisition, and selection, and inclusion in modelling procedures;
4. linear mixed models for statistical analysis of soil and biological data, methods to include spatialization and soil depth as variables, methods to study unbalanced data or including variables with missing data, regression models;
5. overview on models and some case studies: decision trees (random forest, boosted regression trees, others), artificial neural networks, process based models, geomatics, etc..

The Winter School will include theoretical lessons in the morning and practical lessons in the afternoon.

Participants to SAFEST will be able to deal with geodata and their handling and analysis in a wealth of areas, including agriculture, forest, other land uses, the study of soil biodiversity, soil science, farming systems, and other environmental areas.

The Winter School received the support of SHARInG-MeD (PRIMA GA n 2211) and SUS-SOIL (HORIZON EUROPE GA n 101157560).

The Winter School will be activated with at least 15 students. The maximum number of participants is set to 60 students.

The Winter School will be held on campus, in Pisa, at Dipartimento di Scienze Veterinarie, viale delle Piagge, 2.