Data, Trees and Teamwork: ENLIGHT Blended Intensive Programme Brings Together Students for Artificial Intelligence in Forest and Landscape Remote Sensing
This spring, the University of Göttingen welcomed students from across the ENLIGHT network for a Blended Intensive Programme on Artificial Intelligence for Forest and Landscape Remote Sensing. Over one intensive week, participants from Bordeaux, Bratislava, Groningen, Göttingen, and beyond came together to tackle a real research problem: detecting individual tree crowns in high-resolution aerial imagery.
The technical challenge
Working in interdisciplinary teams, students built an AI system from scratch that could spot individual tree crowns in aerial photos, predict tree height or classify tree species. The raw data was anything but tidy, mixing images of very different sizes and qualities with only a small fraction of labeled examples to learn from. Much of the week went into cleaning and preparing this data so a model could learn from it — a task that gave students a firsthand sense of what working with real-world environmental data involves. By the end of the week, teams had a working system ready to be trained.
More than code
For students with computer science backgrounds, the week meant translating technical concepts — version control, model architectures, the reasoning behind each pipeline step — for teammates coming from ecology and forestry. That exchange across disciplines turned out to be one of the most valued parts of the experience. As one student put it, the week was as much about explaining ideas across fields as it was about writing code.
A lesson beyond the classroom
For other participants, the strongest takeaway wasn't technical at all. A cultural exchange activity organised by the Erasmus+ team pushed students to communicate across language barriers and challenge their own assumptions. One student summed up the week's biggest lesson as learning to observe before judging — a reminder that behind every dataset and every model, there are people, perspectives, and a need for genuine collaboration.
Looking ahead
Participants left with new technical skills, a working codebase to build on, and — perhaps more importantly — a broader appreciation for what interdisciplinary, international collaboration demands. Many expressed hope that this kind of programme continues to be offered to ENLIGHT students in the years to come.
