Michael Montani, an Environmental Engineer currently working with his colleague Fabio Cattaneo on their Geoinformatic Engineering master thesis within the Ecology group at DEIB, has been awarded the 2018 YouthMappers Research Fellowship. Within the MASTR-SLS Polisocial project (Renato Casagrandi and Lorenzo Mari), Michael's proposal aims at engaging citizens to map villages in the Saint Louis Region of Senegal and at geolocating aquatic vegetation associated with the risk of a disease transmission by using high resoultion remote sensed imagery.

Seven Fellow-Mentor teams were selected out of over 80 quality applicants from 19 countries (representatives of the more than 5,000 mappers in the YouthMappers network on 106 university campuses in 33 countries) to participate in a 9-month program designed to enlist, enable, and showcase the contributions of open geospatial data for research on resilience of vulnerable populations around the world. Over the life of the program, the teams will have the opportunity to interact and exchange ideas with the other teams from around the world.

They are now taking part in customized technical training sessions, engaging in scientific discussions, and sharing about successful data and analysis practices during the Research Symposium hosted by The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Further information is available in the attached file.