We warmly welcomes our new colleague in the UN-SPIDER Vienna Office, Mr. Coen Bussink. Coen joined UN-SPIDER in August and he will be providing technical and scientific support to the Programme. He is also responsible for organising and leading UN-SPIDER's activities in Africa.
For about two decades, Coen Bussink, a national from the Netherlands, has been using GIS and remote sensing in the area of land use planning, crop monitoring and geographic modelling for development purposes. He was based in several Latin American countries (Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Guatemala), where he worked on projects that used geospatial data from catchment to global levels. He was researcher with the CGIAR in Lima, a global agricultural research partnerhsip, and worked with governmental institutions, NGOs and training centres to promote the use of GIS and remote sensing.
After joining the UN in 2004, he became the focal point for GIS/remote sensing in the area of illicit crop monitoring at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Coen was responsible for designing methods to estimate crop areas and to optimize the use of expensive VHR satellite images. He developed methods and tools to standardize satellite image interpretations, collected field (aerial/ground) data with new techniques, and performed accuracy assessments and risk analysis with geo-statistical approaches. He brings with him a network of organisations that use geospatial data, including universities, research centres and EU/UN organisations.
