Rate My Professor Miina Rautiainen

Miina Rautiainen is a Professor of Remote Sensing in the Department of Built Environment at Aalto University School of Engineering, where she also holds the position of Professor of Geoinformatics. She leads the Remote Sensing Research Team, focusing on the remote sensing and spectroscopy of forests, peatlands, and other vegetation types. Rautiainen earned her doctoral degree in Agriculture and Forestry from the University of Helsinki on November 17, 2005, and was appointed Docent at the same institution in 2008. She completed university pedagogy studies at the University of Helsinki. Since obtaining her doctorate, she has worked in multidisciplinary research teams in Finland and six other countries, spanning forest sciences, remote sensing, atmospheric physics, and climate change research.

Rautiainen serves as Co-Principal Investigator of the Center of Excellence in Peatlands, Climate Change and Ecological Restoration (2026–2033), funded by the Research Council of Finland. Her previous research was supported by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant for the FREEDLES project (2018–2024), multiple projects from the Research Council of Finland since 2007, and private foundations. She chaired the Finnish Society for Forest Sciences from 2019 to 2020 and was vice-chair from 2017 to 2018. Principal investigator of key projects including PEATSPEC (2021–2025), ARTISDIG (2022–2024), DIMEBO (2019–2022), and BOREALITY (2015–2019), her work advances Earth observation, albedo estimation, global satellite products, and contributions to UN Sustainable Development Goals 6, 13, and 15. Notable publications include "Predicting surface soil moisture of northern peatlands from hyper- and multispectral satellite data" (Karlqvist et al., 2026, Remote Sensing of Environment), "Forest structure from airborne laser scanning explains nationwide occurrence patterns of pine marten, stoat and least weasel across Finland" (Lämsä et al., 2026, Forest Ecology and Management), "A spectral–structural characterization of European temperate, hemiboreal, and boreal forests" (Rautiainen et al., 2024, Earth System Science Data), and "Physically based modelling of spectral transmittance through forest canopies" (Hovi et al., 2024, Methods in Ecology and Evolution).