Philippe Rufin

F.R.S.-FNRS Postdoctoral Fellow | Earth & Life Institute, UCLouvain

philippe.rufin[a]uclouvain.be

Blog

Geographer linking Land System Science and Earth Observation with a research focus on advancing methods for large-area mapping of land use, its dynamics, and ecological impacts with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa.

Interests

Land Systems
Earth Observation
Machine Learning / Deep Learning
Geospatial Data Science
Open Science

Academia

Earth & Life Institute, UCLouvain

2023 - 2026

Postdoctoral Fellow | Medium-scale farms in Sub-Saharan Africa

Earth & Life Institute, UCLouvain

2021 - 2023

Postdoctoral Fellow | Field size dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa

Earth Observation Lab, Humboldt-Universität

2019 - 2021

Postdoctoral Fellow | Large-area agriculture mapping

Earth Observation Lab, Humboldt-Universität

2015 - 2019

Ph.D. Geography | Earth Observation

News

Co-Coordinator GLP Working Group on Remote Sensing for Land System Science
ArXiv pre-print on mapping organic agriculture with Sentinel-2 out!
Paper on field size for farm size estimation in Environmental Research Food Systems!
Paper on crop water consumption in Central Asia out in Nature CommunEarthEnviron
Pre-print on geospatial foundation models for flood mapping!
Returning from a successful field work in Gilé National Park, Mozambique
Pre-print: Is field size an indicator of farm size in smallholder-dominated croplands??
Pre-print on national scale field delineation in smallholder landscapes out on arXiv.
ESA Living Planet Symposium 2025 featured EOAgriTwin, SEN4MOZ, & Field delineation work
Paper on responsible AI for Earth Observation published

Selected Publications

See Google Scholar for a full list

Responsible Artificial Intelligence for Earth Observation.
IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine (2025)

Pedram Ghamisi , Weikang Yu , Andrea Marinoni , Caroline Gevaert , Claudio Persello , Sivasakthy Selvakumaran , Manuela Girotto , Benjamin Horton , Philippe Rufin , Patrick Hostert , Fabio Pacifici , Peter Atkinson

paper

To enhance sustainable development goal research, open up commercial satellite image archives.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025)

Philippe Rufin , Patrick Meyfroidt , Felicia Akinyemi , Lyndon Estes , Esther Shupel Ibrahim , Meha Jain , Hannah Kerner , Sá Nogueira Lisboa , David Lobell , Catherine Nakalembe , Claudio Persello , Michelle Picoli , Natasha Ribeiro , Almeida Sitoe , Katharina Waha , Sherrie Wang

paper

Taking it further: Leveraging pseudo-labels for field delineation across label-scarce smallholder regions.
Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation (2024)

Philippe Rufin , Sherrie Wang , Sá Lisboa , Jan Hemmerling , Mirela Tulbure , Patrick Meyfroidt

code data paper

Can we estimate farm size from field size? An empirical investigation of the field size to farm size relationship.
Agricultural Systems (2024)

Clemens Jaenicke , Maximilian Wesemeyer , Cristina Chiarella , Tobia Lakes , Christian Levers , Patrick Meyfroidt , Daniel Mueller , Marie Pratzer , Philippe Rufin

paper

An actor-centered, scalable land system typology for addressing biodiversity loss in the world’s tropical dry woodlands.
Global Environmental Change (2024)

Marie Pratzer , Patrick Meyfroidt , [...] , Philippe Rufin , Mariana Rufino , Mahesh Sankaran , Ricardo Torres , Srinivas Vaidyanathan , Maria Vallejos , Malika Virah-Sawmy , Tobias Kuemmerle

paper

Understanding the robustness of spectral-temporal metrics across the global Landsat archive from 1984 to 2019.
Remote Sensing of Environment (2023)

David Frantz , Philippe Rufin , Andreas Janz , Stefan Ernst , Dirk Pflugmacher , Franz Schug , Patrick Hostert

data paper

Projects

SEN4MOZ: Mapping Shifting Cultivation Dynamics in Conservation Areas of Mozambique using Copernicus Data
European Space Agency - EOAfrica R&D

website

EOAgriTwin: Earth Observation based Digital Twin for Resilient Agriculture under Multiple Stressors
European Space Agency - Digital Twin Components

website

Medium-Scale Farms as Drivers of Deforestation in Sub-Saharan Africa
F.R.S.-FNRS

website

Mapping Field Size Dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa
F.R.S.-FNRS

website

Mapping Agricultural Systems of the Mediterranean

website

Remote Sensing of Dam-Induced Agricultural Change
Elsa Neumann Scholarship - Federal State of Berlin

thesis website