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.

Getting data

After identifying the research question, a critical step is to find or create appropriate data sets for your modeling workflow. We will provide you with datasets from Kilimanjaro project.

Some data source suggestions are:

Sentinel 2

Sentinel data will be needed to upscale your plot level data to the landscape scale. You have already learnt how to acquire Sentinel 2 data from unit 3.

LiDAR and Hyperspectral data

You can use them to relate your selected species data with structural and spectral remote sensing data. This data is available on strato.

Published datasets of Kilimanjaro region

GFBio and Pangea is an excellent source to search what studies have been done in the Kilimanjaro region and accees different datasets. Use ‘KiLi: Kilimanjaro Research Group’ as a search term to get an overview of all published datasets.

Other sources

If you wish to understand the influence of other environmental variables you can of course freely search other data sources like e.g. OpenStreetMap, SoilGrids.

Assignment

Write your outline, therefore

  1. identify your research topic,
  2. follow the steps mentioned above, and
  3. upload your pdf until 27 June 2024 23:59 on ILIAS.

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