Data Science Symposium 2026

Session

Session 1.3 - AI and Earth Systems (Posters)

8 Oct 2026, 17:15

5-1.214 - ATLANTIK / ATLANTIC - Linke Seite – Großer, unterteilbarer Konferenzraum (GEOMAR - Standort Ostufer / GEOMAR - East Shore)

35. Automated identification and classification of fossil pollen from sediments

Kathleen Stoof-Leichsenring

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

Fossil pollen analysis is a key tool for reconstructing past vegetation and climate, but conventional microscopic identification and counting are time-consuming, require substantial taxonomic expertise, and can be affected by observer bias. We develop an automated workflow combining multispectral imaging flow cytometry (MIFC) with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for high-throughput and...

14. Data2AI Companion: A tool assessing data readiness for AI applications

Luca Greiner (Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Data Science, Bremerhaven, Bremen, Germany)

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is central to scientific research, but model performance is fundamentally constrained by data readiness. The FAIR principles govern findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of research data, but not dataset properties that matter for AI like task-specific completeness, feature relevance, label quality or class imbalance. Existing frameworks...

23. Empowering Earth & Environment Research: The Helmholtz Information and Data Science Platforms

Katharina Kriegel (Helmholtz Imaging, DESY), Lena Heel

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

Discover the full spectrum of data science support and expertise at the Helmholtz booth, where five Helmholtz-wide platforms showcase their combined strength to accelerate research—particularly in the Earth and Environment field. These platforms operate across the entire Helmholtz Association to advance AI, imaging, metadata, research software and training. Our booth serves as a...

13. Forecasting and Observing the Open-to-Coastal Ocean for Copernicus Users (FOCCUS): AI-Enhanced Coastal Monitoring and Forecasting for the Digital Ocean

Kelli Johnson (Hereon)

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

Advancements in monitoring and predicting our coastlines is vital for coastal protection in the face of climate change. Novel developments in Digital Ocean technology are driving these advancements, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) enhanced numerical models and coastal observations leveraging data fusion and high-resolution products. The EU Horizon FOCCUS project (Forecasting and...

38. From local observations to regional habitat maps: a multimodal data approach for monitoring Baltic Sea brown-algal reefs

Anne Hennke

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

Brown-algal reefs are important marine habitats and potential contributors to Blue Carbon storage, yet their abundance and spatial distribution are difficult to assess over large areas. Optical observations provide detailed information on algal occurrence and morphology, but their spatial coverage is limited. To overcome this scaling challenge, we combine optical data from autonomous...

47. Identifying numerical instabilities: Leveraging neural networks for numerical noise detection

Stephan Juricke

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

Ocean models have to balance efficiency and accuracy. The general assumption is that the higher the resolution, the more realistic the simulated flow. However, the actual grid spacing is not the physically realistic and reliable resolution of a model configuration. Numerical artifacts due to choices of solvers, numerical schemes or parameterizations can affect the accuracy and reliability of...

7. Intraseasonal prediction of monthly storminess with ACE2 atmospheric emulator and Random Forests

Proshonni Aziz (Helmholtz-Zentrum hereon)

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

This research explores the predictability of seasonal storminess in the North Sea and East China Sea using machine learning and the ACE2 weather model emulator, focusing on stratospheric and upper-tropospheric influences on winter storms. Using ERA5 reanalysis data (1940–2024), a storminess index based on storm frequency was developed to examine links with large-scale atmospheric fields.
For...

48. iSEA: Intelligent Seafloor & Animal Image Annotator

Raphaela Neves Lopes

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly computer vision algorithms like YOLO, has become standard for automated organism detection. However, AI complexity remains a barrier for non-specialist researchers, limiting adoption in marine biodiversity studies. This project presents iSEA (Intelligent Seafloor & Animal Image Annotator), an interactive Python-based GUI that integrates YOLO for...

3. Learning Where It Matters: Instance-Wise Feature Attribution for Antarctic Sea Ice Drivers

Nina Öhlckers (Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Universität Bremen)

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

Antarctic Sea Ice (ASI) shows strong regional and interannual variability shaped by a complex interplay of atmospheric and oceanic processes. As the climate system redistributes energy poleward to offset radiative imbalances, remote conditions can influence ASI through large-scale circulation patterns, or teleconnections. Established teleconnection indices link these patterns to ASI...

12. Memento 2.0: Revision of the global synthesis product for N2O and CH4 data

Daniela Niemeyer-Teuteberg

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

The ocean plays a key role in mitigating climate change, with N2O and CH4 acting as potent greenhouse gases within the ocean-atmosphere system. Robust, well-curated data are essential to reduce uncertainties and refine predictions of N2O and CH4 fluxes (Bange 2022), leading GOOS (Global Ocean Observing System) to designate N2O as an Essential Ocean Variable (EOV). Building on this, MEMENTO...

51. O2A WORKSPACE - Scientific Collaboration Made Simple

Nico Harms (AWI)

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

Your Managed Platform for Data-Driven Research

Research today rarely stays within one institution, one dataset, or one infrastructure. As it spans providers and partners, the tools that support it tend to fragment along the same lines: every institution provides its own environments, connects them to its own data by hand, and enforces its own access rules, with little of that effort...

44. SEA2LAND Navigator-GPT

Harsh Grover (Hereon)

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

Coastal and marine planning is difficult due to complex regulations, large and fragmented datasets, and the involvement of multiple authorities across local, regional, and national levels. The SEA2LAND Navigator tool was developed to support this process by organizing governance responsibilities and providing access to a wide range of relevant resources. Given the breadth and depth of...

30. Shipboard ADCP Data acquired by the DAM Project “Marine Data – Research Vessels”: Machine Learning for Automated Seafloor Detection based on Acoustic Backscatter

Robert Kopte (Institut für Geowissenschaften, CAU Kiel)

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

[Shortened! Full abstract as pdf]
Shipboard ADCPs provide continuous upper-ocean velocity profiles and are indispensable for oceanographic field studies. In shelf regions and coastal waters, a particularly time-consuming part of post-processing is editing the velocity time series to remove contamination near the seafloor caused by sidelobe interference from the bottom echo. Existing automated...

32. Spatial Downscaling of Pollen-Based Vegetation Reconstructions into Paleo Land Cover Maps

Laura Schild (Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Potsdam)

08/10/2026, 17:15

Talk

Past land cover dynamics provide important context for understanding long-term ecosystem responses to climatic change, but paleoecological records are typically sparse, irregular, and site-based. Here, we present a spatial downscaling framework that transforms pollen-derived vegetation reconstructions into gridded paleo land cover maps. The pipeline first translates pollen-based vegetation...

37. Unsupervised Embeddings of In-Situ Particle Data for Mesoscale Eddy 3D Characterization

Federico Scarscelli (GEOMAR)

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

Mesoscale eddies modulate vertical particulate organic carbon (POC) flux, yet linking eddy dynamics to in-situ biological observations at scale remains a major data-engineering bottleneck. Satellite altimetry (e.g., SWOT, AVISO Eddy Atlas) and in-situ particle imaging (e.g., Underwater Vision Profiler, UVP) differ substantially in format, resolution, and archival structure.

We present the...

46. Vibing to Visibility: Using the Bot to Shed Light into the Data Abyss

Barbara Glemser

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

Research institutes often host databases containing petabytes (PB) of valuable scientific data. This data can originate from different times, locations, devices, and research groups, and may be in different states of curation. Getting a visual overview of such data can therefore be challenging and time-consuming. This poster shows how AI can support the planning, building, and debugging of a...

18. Whale vocalization detection on noisy data

Marie Vogler (Zentrum für Bioinformatik, Universität Hamburg)

08/10/2026, 17:15

Poster

Analysis of passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) data is a cost-effective method to study whale presence. The resulting recordings have a strong imbalance between short call events and long periods of background noise, making automated whale call detection challenging. Also, the annotation of the whale calls is often imprecise, which complicates model training. State-of-the-art methods convert...