"The internship in Cambisol has been a 360 degrees life experience. Moving to another country, adapting to a different culture, weather and diet, finding a stable place where to live, building new relationships. These are all side-experiences that one needs to take into account when approaching a new job experience abroad and that are an integrating part of it that can teach an equal amount of lessons.

But most of all, diving into a young startup reality and being able to follow all the steps of an innovative and explorative study in the realms of Precision Agriculture and remote sensing, is what brought me in Cambisol. “Mapping from A to Z”, (this is the way I like to call my internship project) involved the design and performance of a data collection campaign, the production of yield maps aimed at picturing the spatial yield variability across the orchard, the collection of drone images used to calculate multispectral vegetation indexes along with small-scale topography maps and the statistical analysis of spatial data.

Easier said than done, they say. All these steps required careful planning, constant studying, a ready-to-learn approach, but also failure acceptance and hard work to succeed. All of this would never have been possible without a supportive work environment created by two young entrepreneurs always ready to help and to involve you in amazing extra-work experiences across the Netherlands."

Eugenio Straffelini, MSc in Forestry Sciences and Land Protection from the University of Padova (Italy), completed a postgraduate internship at Cambisol, becoming now one of our collaborators. Below he tells us about his experience!

"My name is Eugenio Straffelini and I come from Riva del Garda, a little town in the North of Italy. Some months ago I graduated in Forestry and Environmental Sciences at the University of Padova, working on a thesis about the use of a drone for remote sensing of the Earth surface and analyzing the processes on it. Thanks to that, I realized that the combination between technology and environment was exactly what I am looking for my dream-job, pushing me to improve my skills finding a professional experience abroad.

And right here, thanks to Professor Paolo Tarolli from the University of Padova, in November 2018 I flew to the Netherlands for a great experience: accompanying Teun Vogel in the adventure at Cambisol, a start-up full of nice ideas and professional skills. Besides business and work, we did a lot of activities like spending time in different parts of this beautiful country and enjoying nights with biljart and good food. Last weekend, I only ate frikadel speciaal, bitterballen and kroketten, very nice. And we enjoyed Zeeuwse Mosselen and much more.

We worked in a team on different captivating projects, exploring the use of drone to build high resolution models of the surface in an efficient way, identify potential problems and propose solutions. All of this in a GIS environment, trying to obtain scientifically provenmaps but also attractive from a functional and aesthetic point of view. As a start, a very interesting job was the drone survey of a golf area in Den Haag, where some bunkers are affected by collapse problems due to erosion produced by heavy rain. Here we flew the drone for surveying the Green, built the 3D maps and analysed it for studying the hydrological processes."