Katharina Seeger – Bernd Rendel Prizewinner 2025
Katharina Seeger
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Katharina Seeger’s research focuses on low-lying coastal areas such as river deltas and coastal plains, and their vulnerability to sea-level rise and flooding from storm surges, tsunamis and river floods. Many coastal regions such as densely populated deltas are subsiding as a result of both natural processes and human activity, making them especially susceptible. Seeger is particularly concerned with regions where little or no local data is currently available or accessible. For this reason, her work relies heavily on freely available satellite-based remote sensing data. She develops methods for processing and combining this data to generate reliable information on flood risk.
In the course of her doctoral research, Seeger has specialised in assessing land elevation relative to local sea level. She investigates how satellite-derived elevation models need to be integrated with sea-level data in order to ensure and improve the quality of flood hazard assessments. Seeger’s work spans local, regional and global scales, and she is involved in numerous research projects around the world, including on the Ayeyarwady Delta in Myanmar, the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and the Gulf of Guinea – all regions for which data remains scarce.