About the position

Darwin Geospatial is looking for a candidate to join a three-year Industrial PhD programme developed in collaboration with Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.
The selected candidate will work on SoilSaver, an applied R&D; project focused on developing artificial intelligence systems to detect, characterise and predict soil erosion, land degradation and desertification using Earth observation data.
A central objective of the PhD will be the creation of a large-scale, public, multimodal and reproducible geospatial dataset designed for the training and evaluation of machine learning models.
The candidate may also contribute to other Darwin Geospatial R&D; activities related to habitat mapping, urban green infrastructure, ecological connectivity and environmental monitoring.

Key responsibilities

Design and build the SoilSaver dataset by integrating Sentinel-2 imagery, PNOA orthophotos, digital elevation models, LiDAR data, climate variables and reference information.
Develop machine learning and deep learning models for the detection,



semantic segmentation and temporal prediction of erosion and land degradation processes.
Build reproducible pipelines for data preprocessing, model training, validation and evaluation.
Explore semantic segmentation architectures, geospatial foundation models, graph neural networks and physics-informed approaches.
Analyse satellite image time series and environmental variables.
Contribute to the publication of open datasets, code, scientific papers and conference presentations.
Support the deployment of research outputs into Darwin Geospatial’s operational tools and products.
Collaborate on additional R&D; projects involving automated habitat mapping, urban green infrastructure, ecological connectivity and environmental monitoring.

Essential requirements

An official Master’s degree, or equivalent qualification, granting access to doctoral studies.
Academic background in engineering, computer science, geomatics, remote sensing,

📌 Industrial PhD in Remote Sensing and ML for Soil Degradation (Madrid)
🏢 Darwin Geospatial
📍 Madrid