Ronald Reagan Okoth

PhD student

Department of Remote Sensing (RS)
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ)
Permoserstraße 15, 04318 Leipzig

Tel.: +49 341 6025 3699
email: reagan.okoth@ufz.de

Career details

Aug 2026 - Present	PhD Candidate, HotSOILs: Geospatial Analysis of Physical Drivers and Vegetation Impacts of Soil Hot Extremes, UFZ
Oct 2025 - Aug 2026	Geospatial Analyst, Automated Environmental Mapping and Multi-Source Raster Data Integration, unique land use GmbH
May 2023 - Sep 2025	Manager of Earth Observation, Spatial Feasibility Assessment and Regulatory Eligibility Verification for Carbon Projects, FORLIANCE
Oct 2022 - Apr 2023	M.Sc. Thesis Student, STARFM-Based Data Fusion of MODIS-Landsat and Machine Learning-Based Continuous Mapping of Soil Temperature from In-Situ Points, UFZ
May 2022 - Sep 2022	Student Assistant, Automated Acquisition and Pre-Processing of Spatial Datasets for Environmental Simulations, UFZ
Jan 2022 - Mar 2022	Data Analyst Intern, Automated Geospatial Data Extraction and PDF Parsing for Locust Treatment Archives, DLR (German Aerospace Center)
Feb 2021 - Sep 2021	Research Assistant, Spatiotemporal Image Classification and Arctic Ecosystem Phenology Analysis, Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI)
Aug 2020 - Nov 2020	Intern, Spatiotemporal Image Classification and Arctic Ecosystem Phenology Analysis, Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI)
Jul 2019 - Oct 2019	Internship Trainee, Computer Vision Data Annotation and Aerial Remote Sensing for Precision Agriculture, VITO

Education

Oct 2020 - May 2023	Master of Science in Applied Earth Observation and Geoanalysis of the Living Environment (EAGLES),Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg Final grade: 1.3 (High distinction) Thesis: Fusing Remote Sensing Data: Application in Soil Temperature Prediction
Sep 2018 - Jun 2020	Master of Science in Marine and Lacustrine Science and Management,Vrije Universität Brussels, Ghent University, and University of Antwerpen Final grade: 16/20 (Distinction) Thesis: Earth Observation-Based Land Cover Analysis and Machine Learning Assessment of Coastal Dune Geomorphology and Vegetation Dynamics
Aug 2012 - Jun 2016	Bachelor of Science in Coastal and Marine Resource Management, Kenyatta University, Nairobi Kenya

Research interests

Soil & Land Surface Temperature: Tracking when, where, and why soils reach extreme heat.Satellite Data
Fusion: Combining different satellite datasets to get high-resolution imagery.
Ecosystem & Vegetation Health: Measuring how extreme soil heat damages forests and grasslands.
Mapping &Scaling Data: Using machine learning to turn local, ground-station measurements into continuous maps.
Geospatial Data Workflows: Automating the collection, pre-processing, and visualization of large environmental datasets.

My PhD research focuses on understanding extreme soil temperatures across Europe and their impacts on ecosystems. As part of the HotSOILs project at the UFZ, I combine satellite observations, in-situ measurements, climate data and geospatial analysis to investigate how factors such as soil moisture, land cover, radiation and climate warming contribute to soil hot extremes. I am also examining whether and to what extent these extremes are linked to declines in vegetation health across European forests and grasslands. A key part of my work is developing and analysing high-resolution soil temperature datasets to better capture these events and their spatial and temporal variability.

Awards

Awardee, VLIR-UOS ICP Connect Scholarship, Fully Funded Academic Award for International Postgraduate Studies in Belgium
1st Runner's Up, Global Impact Pitch Competition, Seed Funding for Index-Based Agricultural Insurance Frameworks for African Smallholder Farmers, Georgetown University 2021

Publications / Abstracts

Lisovski S., Runge A., Shevtsova I., Landgraf N., Morgenstern A., Okoth R. R., and Heim B.: A New Habitat Map of the Lena Delta in Arctic Siberia Based on Field and Remote Sensing Datasets. Earth System Science Data. 2025, https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/17/1707/2025/
Lisovski S., Runge A., Okoth R. R., Shevtsova I., and Heim B.: Lena Delta Land Cover Classification (2018, Sentinel-2) [dataset]. PANGAEA. 2024, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.946407

Contact

Head
Prof. Dr. Jian Peng
Department of Remote Sensing
jian.peng@ufz.de

Assistant
Catharina Reul
Department Remote Sensing and
Remote Sensing Centre for Earth System Research
catharina.reul-jimenez@ufz.de
Tel.: +49 341 6025-2335

Permoserstraße 15 | 04318 Leipzig | Germany

News / Press

We’re hiring: Research Scientist for Soil–Vegetation–Atmosphere Interactions under Climate Extremes

The Terrestrial Water Dynamics team successfully attended the EGU General Assembly 2024 in Vienna! Presenting cutting-edge research and fostering collaborations, we're already looking forward to next year's EGU.

The UFZ Forest Condition Monitor is now live. It provides spatially explicit information about the condition of Germany's forests from 2016 to 2022.

Two of our MoDEV PhD candidates published their latest research in Remote Sensing of Environment. Antonia Ludwig assessed the spectral variation hypothesis doi and Toni Schmidt compared soil moisture products with cosmic-ray neutron sensing observations doi.

UFZ press release of a study led by Almudena García-García: Heat extremes in the soil are underestimated

The forest condition monitor from our working group LACY is part of the Environmental Photo Festival horizons zingst 2023 and publicly displayed in the city Zingst until summer 2024.

UFZ press release of a study led by Francisco José Cuesta Valero: Underestimated Heat Storage

Daniel Doktor interviewed by radioeins: presenting the forest monitor.

Congratulations to Reagan Okoth for a successful oral Master defense!

Welcome Peter Borrmann to join us as a PhD candidate in December 2022.

Fantastic and successful first department retreat in Grimma since the establishment of the team:

Germany-wide grassland management and land-use intensity information depicted from satellite-data (Lange et al. 2022) are now available as download and web service

Congratulations to Francisco José Cuesta Valero for being awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, and we warmly welcome him to join us in October 2021.

MoDEV project kick-off seminar was successfully held on Sep 21, 2021. Four talented and motivated phd candidates will apply novel model-data fusion methods to better understand environmental variability based on high-resolution remote sensing.

MoDEV

Remote Sensing Center for Earth System Research (RSC4Earth) kicked off!

https://rsc4earth.de

https://twitter.com/Rsc4Earth

New publications

García-García, A. and Peng, J.: Generation and evaluation of energy and water fluxes from the HOLAPS framework: Comparison with satellite-based products during extreme hot weather
Remote Sensing of Environment, 315, 114451, 2024 doi

Ludwig, A., Doktor, D., and Feilhauer, H.: Is spectral pixel-to-pixel variation a reliable indicator of grassland biodiversity? A systematic assessment of the spectral variation hypothesis using spatial simulation experiments, Remote Sensing of Environment, 302, 113988, 2024
doi

Schmidt, T., Schrön, M., Li, Z., Francke, T., Zacharias, S., Hildebrandt, A., and Peng, J.: Comprehensive Quality Assessment of Satellite- and Model-Based Soil Moisture Products against the COSMOS Network in Germany, Remote Sensing of Environment, 301, 113930, 2024
doi

Almudena García-García, Francisco José Cuesta-Valero, Diego G. Miralles, Miguel D. Mahecha, Johannes Quaas, Markus Reichstein, Jakob Zscheischler and Jian Peng. Soil heat extremes can outpace air temperature extremes, Nature Climate Change
(doi)

Cuesta-Valero, F.J., Beltrami, H., García-García, A., Krinner, G., Langer, M., MacDougall, A.H., Nitzbon, J., Peng, J., von Schuckmann, K., Seneviratne, S.I., Thiery, W., Vanderkelen, I., & Wu, T.: Continental heat storage: contributions from the ground, inland waters, and permafrost thawing. Earth System Dynamics, 14, 609-627, 2023.

Mahecha, M., Bastos, A., Bohn, F., Eisenhauer, N., Feilhauer, H., Hartmann, H., Hickler, T., Kalesse-Los, H., Migliavacca, M., Otto, F., Peng, J., Quaas, J., Tegen, I., Weigelt, A., Wendisch, M., Wirth, C., (2022):
Biodiversity loss and climate extremes — study the feedbacks, Nature, 612, 30-32, 2022.

Lange M, Feilhauer H, Kühn I, Doktor D (2022):
Mapping land-use intensity of grasslands in Germany with machine learning and Sentinel-2 time series.
Remote Sensing of Environment 277,112888
(doi)

Peng, J., Albergel, C., Balenzano, A., Brocca, L., Cartus, O., Cosh, M.H., Crow, W.T., Dabrowska-Zielinska, K., Dadson, S., Davidson, M.W.J., de Rosnay, P., Dorigo, W., Gruber, A., Hagemann, S., Hirschi, M., Kerr, Y.H., Lovergine, F., Mahecha, M.D., et al., (2021):
A roadmap for high-resolution satellite soil moisture applications – confronting product characteristics with user requirements.
Remote Sensing of Environment, 112162
(doi)

Balenzano, A., Mattia, F., Satalino, G., Lovergine, F.P., Palmisano, D., Peng, J., et al., (2021):
Sentinel-1 soil moisture at 1 km resolution: a validation study.
Remote Sensing of Environment, 263, 112554
full text (doi)

Huang, J., Zhang, Y., Bing, H., Peng, J., Dong, F., Gao, J., & Arhonditsis, G.B. (2021):
Characterizing the River Water Quality in China: Recent Progress and On-Going Challenges.
Water Research 201: 117309
full text (doi)

Ayalew, D.A., Deumlich, D., Šarapatka, B., Doktor, D., (2020):
Quantifying the sensitivity of NDVI-based C factor estimation and potential soil erosion prediction using spaceborne Earth observation data
Remote Sens. 12 (7), art. 1136
full text (doi)

Preidl, S., Lange, M., Doktor, D., (2020):
Introducing APiC for regionalised land cover mapping on the national scale using Sentinel-2A imagery
Remote Sens. Environ. 240 , art. 111673
full text (doi)