For three months this summer and autumn I have been based at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) in Saskatoon, Canada, as part of my studies at the Faculty of Environmental Sciences, CZU. I am a master's student in Spatial Environmental Sciences with a focus on GIS and remote sensing, and a member of SENS.
The traineeship revolves around my master's thesis, which uses thermal and multispectral UAV imagery to estimate surface temperature in an urban environment. The case study is a research parking lot on the CZU campus in Suchdol, where conventional concrete pavers are compared with vegetative, permeable paving, some of the plots treated with substrates such as biochar. The question behind it is easy to ask and surprisingly hard to answer: how much cooler is a green surface than a grey one, and under which conditions? Getting to an answer means putting drone thermal imagery together with ground sensors measuring soil moisture, surface temperature and reflected radiation, and with spectral measurements of the surfaces themselves.
Saskatoon is a good place to be asking that question. It is a prairie city built around wide streets and generous parking, with a sharply continental climate, so the trade-off between paving a surface and cooling it is visible on almost every block.
My work here is mostly research and data: processing the measurements and working out what they actually say. I also meet regularly with my host supervisor, whose background in urban planning and green infrastructure keeps pushing me to treat my results not as a set of temperature values but as something a city could act on.
What I have enjoyed most is spending concentrated time on a topic I genuinely care about, in an academic environment whose starting assumptions differ from the ones I was used to in Prague. It has changed how I read an urban surface, and how I think about what a thermal image is really showing.
None of this would have been possible without my teachers at CZU, who helped me plan and carry out the field campaign and gave me a dataset solid enough to work with from the other side of the world. I am grateful to them for the measurements and for supporting my application for the traineeship in the first place.
The traineeship has also been about everything outside the university: a Canadian summer and autumn, Prince Albert National Park, the Rockies, and the slower discovery of a city and a way of life very different from home.
For me this is not only a step forward in my thesis, but a lesson in working independently and in how research can be done somewhere else.
Katka – student FZP
