It is absolutely essential that we share our expertise and knowledge

"I also believe that it is absolutely essential that we share our expertise and knowledge with our colleagues in countries under development. I want to increase connections."

    Jan Dirk Wegner

Q: Reading the ETH news item that talked about how your maps show parameters such as diversity, agriculture use and deforestation, but also mentioned you made these maps and the software you use to make them available for download and use on public platforms. Why is this aspect of open access so central to your work?

A: I think the first thing is transparency. That people can really see what we did, and how we implemented it. And then repeatability, that people can repeat our results and see what we did. And then third, they can take it as a basis and develop something much more exciting than what we did from there.

This way, they don't have to always start from scratch. I think this will boost our science enormously if we share our source code openly. And so, we try to do it with as much source code software methods as we can. From my point of view, the open source approach for software, but also for publishing papers, is very important to basically enable our colleagues in underprivileged countries, countries under development, to gain access to the latest tech and latest progress immediately because there's no paywall. They can just download. If they have questions, they can email us and they can basically leapfrog a couple of years or decades in development. They can immediately start. And that's fantastic because this enables us on a global level to really bring together a lot of smart people and benefit from all this brain capital, but not only from those countries that have all the elite institutions, like Europe, the U.S. and China.

Q: EcoVision Lab is part of ETH for Development (ETH4D) as well as the World Food System Center. What is it about such collaborative initiatives with goals of sustainability that you find important?

A: The first thing why I'm involved in such centers is that I enjoy interdisciplinary research very much. Our team has mainly a computer science or engineering background, so we really want to collaborate with domain experts in environmental and agricultural sciences to learn about particular problems because we don't have the expertise.

I also believe that it is absolutely essential that we share our expertise and knowledge with our colleagues in countries under development. I want to increase connections; I want to get to know these people. The other way around is that I believe there's a lot of incredibly intelligent people in African and Asian countries that I simply don't know. They are not in my network. And the other way around, that's a part for the development of those countries: we are not in their network. And from my experience, a lot of these people are highly intelligent and have a lot of good ideas, but because they don't have the network, they do not have the chance to ask questions to us.

Also, a lot of very good ideas, from my point of view, are wasted; they create incremental novelty and go to big tech companies. I want to motivate more colleagues from my field to create something for human and social well-being and to work globally, to do something also for the well-being of nature, basically for the benefit of the planet. Because if we could divert only 5% of all those people who create all those ideas, to global goals and have them collaborate with people in environmental and social sciences, then think we can move things forward a lot.

"I want to motivate more colleagues from my field to create something for human and social well-being and to work globally."

Jan Dirk Wegner