Project outline

Learn more about the requirements for creating a project outline and for the structure, content, and format of your research project.

Content and structure

The project outline should include

  • a title, of course,
  • the authors,
  • an introduction outlining the state of the art, research need and relevance of the expected results in the context of your research question,
  • a data section describing the intended data you are planning to use,
  • a method section with details on the methods you plan to apply on your data for getting an answer to you research question,
  • a discussion section, where you discuss the implications, conclusions, potential limitations and improvements, picking up the story you created in the introduction,
  • a timetable with important work packages and milestones you aim to work on for reaching the project goal, and
  • references on relevant scientific papers, which have been published in the context of your research question.

Note that the project outline should not exceed two pages. These pages will help the instructors to give feedback on especially the feasibility of your project.

Where to get data?

After identifying the research question, a critical step is to find or create appropriate data sets for your modeling workflow. Some data source suggestions are:

Digital orthophotos

You can download e.g. digital orthophotos of Hesse provided by the Hessische Verwaltung für Bodenmanagement und Geoinformation, here. You can also download e.g. almost all geodata of North Rhine-Westphalia (Geoportal NRW) free of charge.

Please also take into consideration that the file size and hence processing time of the DOPs depends on the selected study area. As a rough guideline,1GB roughly corresponds to 30km² (40cm resolution, RGBA).

Sentinel-2

If your research question focuses on a topic with a larger extent or is out of the boundaries of Hesse/North Rhine-Westphalia, it is presumably required to download your data somewhere else. One possible data source is the Sentinel-2 mission. You can download Sentinel-2 data via the sen2r-package.

Other sources

In addition to the above mentioned data sources you can of course freely search for other sources of spatial data, like e.g. Geoportal NRW, OpenStreetMap, Kaggle, etc.

You might also want to check out data sources related to LiDAR or digital elevation models, or use indices like the NDVI.

You have also learnt to create your own shapefiles for obtaining training data. This could be well necessary if there is no available data set for your (specific) topic.

Feedback

Feedback on the outline will be given in the next session. On the one hand, it is necessary to submit the outline in time, so that there is enough time for the instructors to prepare feedback. On the other hand, the feedback will be given in the session. In order to make the feedback understandable for everyone, your group should briefly present your outline within 5 minutes. No slides are needed, the two-page outline is sufficient.

Comments?

You can leave comments under this Issue if you have questions or remarks about the assignment.

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