Sophie Bontemps is a Senior Scientist and Project Manager at UCLouvain (Belgium). She graduated as a bio-engineer in land use planning from UCLouvain in 2004 and earned her PhD in 2010 on land cover change detection using high-temporal-resolution satellite data at continental scales.Sophie played a key role in several ESA initiatives, including the GlobCover, GlobCorine, and CCI-LandCover projects, contributing to both land cover mapping and validation.
Since 2014, her work has focused on agriculture, leading major international projects such as ESA’s Sen2-Agri, Sen4CAP and Sen4Stat, developing innovative methods for crop mapping, monitoring farming practices, and supporting agricultural statistics. She has extensive experience in national field campaign design and user community engagement.
Sophie also served as co-chair of the CEOS Land Product Validation Subgroup and is a member of the GEOGLAM Executive Committee.