Petri Pellikka

Petri Pellikka is a professor of geoinformatics at the University of Helsinki since 2002. He is with the Department of Geosciences and Geography and Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research, where he leads Earth Change Observation Laboratory. He is the chairman of the Geoscience group of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters of which he has been a member since 2010. He has been a visiting professor at LIESMARS at Wuhan University since 2019.

He has been studying land use and land cover changes in Africa since early 2000s using remote sensing and environmental sensing instruments and data. He is also interested in causes of land use change and consequences of it to climate and ecosystem services. Recently he has been developing climate smart agriculture and livestock management approaches together with alternative livelihoods. He has supervised over 75 MSc and over 40 PhD thesis and is an author of more than 230 peer-reviewed papers.

He founded Taita Research Station in 2009 for the University of Helsinki in Kenya, which he led until 2024. Currently, he is a research director of Finnish Southern Africa Cooperation Institute based in Namibia.