Survey Review Prize
Awarded for the best paper submitted for peer review
About the Award
Survey Review Ltd funds a biennial prize of €2000 for the best paper submitted for peer review and presentation at the Congress or Working Week of the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) and submitted by an author who fulfils the FIG definition of a Young Surveyor.
We hope that this award will encourage the submission of high-quality papers to the FIG Congress and to Survey Review. This move is a pleasing development of an existing relationship with FIG, in which refereed papers presented at FIG Congresses or Working Weeks have been published in the journal.
FIG is the premier international organisation representing the interests of surveyors worldwide. It is a federation of the national member associations and covers the whole range of professional fields within the global surveying, geomatics, geodesy and geo-information community. It provides an international forum for discussion and development aiming to promote professional practice and standards.
Prize winning papers are provided as free to access on the Survey Review publishing website.
2026
The prize of €2000 was awarded at the FIG Congress in Cape Town, South Africa for the paper UAV LiDAR flight planning for high-precision rockfall monitoring in alpine environments: first strategies and preliminary results on Mt. Hochvogel by Leonard Trill, Lukas Raffl and Christoph Holst.
Leonard and Lukas are PhD students and Christoph is a Professor of Engineering Geology at at the Technical University of Munich.
The abstract notes “This paper outlines a practical workflow for surveying alpine regions that are susceptible to rockfalls using UAV LiDAR. The primary goal is to capture the area of interest as comprehensively as possible while ensuring high geometric resolution and accuracy. The generated point clouds are utilized to detect deformations with high precision, capable of measuring changes within a few centimeters. The resulting findings contribute to alpine monitoring and thus also to future hazard prevention measures to protect people and nature. In this study, we apply our workflow to the rockfall on Mt. Hochvogel, located at the border between Germany and Austria”.
With climate change leading to an increase in landslides and rockfalls as a result of the decline in permafrost due to rising temperatures and more frequent weather events, understanding and predicting such natural hazards has become increasingly important and the paper makes a important contribution to this endeavour.
Congratulations to the authors for an outstanding paper.
