On September 28, 2019 all of CDE sholars along with another participant from joint degree programme has visited Berchtesgaden National Park in Bavaria, Germany. The park is located in the mountainous area south of the town of Berchtesgaden. The eastern, southern, and western boundaries of the park coincide with the state border between Germany and Austria. In the center of the park is a large lake, the Königssee, which is elongated from the south to the west and is the source of the Königsseer Ache, a right tributary of the Salzach. A smaller lake, the Obersee, is located above the Königssee and drains into it. The whole area of the park belongs to the drainage basin of the Salzach, and, consequently, of the Danube. West of the lake is the massif of Watzmann (2,713 metres (8,901 ft)), and beyond that, separated by the Wimbachtal valley, the massif of Hochkalter (2,607 metres (8,553 ft)). The Watzmann is the third highest mountain massif in Germany. The Watzmann Glacier, located below the eastern face of the Watzmann, and the Blaueis, adjacent to the Hochkalter, are two of the five glaciers in Germany. (Source : wikipedia).
There is a good reason why the CDE commitee select the Berchtesgaden National Park as the destination of the field trip. Berchtesgaden National Park itself has a long connection with geospatial technology, since it was the first institution which applied GIS mapping technology using commercial ESRI suite software. The Berchtesgaden National Park often collaborates with researcher across the globe to map the biodiversity, topography and land monitoring of the national park. Their evolution from using Prime GIS software until ArcGIS online has been featured in ESRI User Conference 2014 (http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/proc14/papers/151_176.pdf) and their current ArcGIS Online portal can be accessed from this link : http://haus-der-berge.maps.arcgis.com/home/index.html .