Lisa Gutermuth
Main focus: Remote Sensing
Languages: English, German
City: Berlin
Country: Germany
Topics: remote sensing, data and society, digital activism, sustainable agriculture
Lisa has been researching the topic of satellite imagery as applied to agriculture, the environment, and human rights for the past year. Her masters thesis was titled, "Satellite Imagery in Agriculture: Commercialisation and Sustainability in Germany," and she has also given a talk at the Chaos Communication Camp specifically related to the data protection and privacy implications of widespread satellite imagery availability.
She works at Tactical Technology Collective, an organisation dedicated to the use of information in activism where in addition to using satellite imagery in her work, she works on projects dealing with digital security for marginalised communities.
Alongside this for the past two years she has been an active participant at the urban gardening project, Prinzessinnengarten, in Kreuzberg, Berlin, where she has led workshops, organised garden work days and films, and taken part in the urban gardening and sustainable cities discourses.
Examples of previous talks / appearances:
Satellite imagery has been used since the 1960s to monitor agricultural activities at a national and international level. It is only now that the image quality and cost feasibility have made satellite imagery available to individual farmers in application to crop quality analysis, yield prediction, and other measures related to precision farming. Farmers can now pinpoint problem areas of their fields and address them on the spot, rather than blanketly spraying fertilizer and pesticides, which has the potential for environmental and economic benefits. However, this development has launched agriculture into new territory ridden with issues of privacy, data protection, and autonomy of farm inputs and activities. This is a discussion of the state of affairs in agricultural earth observation and what we can do to ensure that it is used for improved practices and not against the producers of our food.