Theocharidis, Christos
Θεοχαρίδης, Χρήστος
Mr Christos Theocharidis is a Forester-Environmentalist and a PhD candidate in "Earth Surveillance & Space Monitoring of the Environment" at the Department of Civil Engineering and Geomatics of the Cyprus University of Technology. Currently, he is a Research Assistant at the ERATOSTHENES Centre of Excellence. He has completed his undergraduate studies at the Democritus University of Thrace in the Department of Forestry and Management of the Environment and Natural Resources. His research focuses on forest observation and crops utilising and integrating various remote sensing technologies. He worked on various funded research projects like - "ASTARTE" (EXCELLENCE/0918/0341), "ESA-CROSS" (CY3_11 / Contract 4000131190), "ESA-CROSS-II (CY4_14 / Contract 4000135546)", project FPCUP (Framework Partnership Agreement on Copernicus User Uptake), Action 2018-1-96 "Copernicus promotion for EDUCATION (Schools and Young Researchers)", SGA grant no. 2019/SI2.819207/06 and EDAFOS project funded by ESA (CY5_10), "Development and testing of desertification risk and pressures mapping and Assessment tool" (ongoing). In addition, he participated in several research proposal writing. He specialised in time-series analysis with radar and multi-band to understand forest density and phenological changes while looking into crop classifications. For his doctoral dissertation, he reads about active and optical remote sensing to monitor forest health, identifying possible abrupt changes in forest phenology, which may be due to various environmental, climatic, and anthropogenic factors. It is worth highlighting that he is proficient at processing remote sensing satellite data in GIS software like ArcMap, ArcGIS Pro, QGIS, and SNAP while using R and Python to automate and ease the processing and analysis of big data. It is worth mentioning that he used to be a firefighter volunteer, and his training made him a highly motivated person and very passionate about protecting the environment. Therefore, he is interested in using his academic background to tackle related environmental issues (e.g. understanding the effects of climate change and using them as evidence to promote environmentally friendly policies). During his undergraduate and postgraduate studies, Christos acquired essential skills in Cartography, Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Science. He is a highly motivated person willing to keep learning and continue improving his skills