György Buttner

He began his career at the Department of Geophysics of the Faculty of Natural Sciences of ELTE University with magnetosphere research.

In 1978, he joined the work of the group that created the domestic application of satellite remote sensing at the Penci Cosmic Geodetic Observatory of the Institute of Geodesy and Remote Sensing (FÖMI). His task was to lay the foundation for the processing of digital satellite images for national economic purposes.
In 1981, he studied the subject in Toronto, Canada, on a two-month scholarship.

He worked at FÖMI for 33 years, primarily in the field of developing environmental applications of remote sensing methods. During this time, they went from algorithm development on a mainframe and then on a special image processing workstation to operational applications running on PCs. He headed the Environmental Remote Sensing Department of FÖMI for about 15 years. He occasionally taught remote sensing at Hungarian universities.

Since the mid-1990s, they have been involved in the European Union's land cover mapping program (CORINE Land Cover, CLC). Under its leadership, they created the country's first EU-compliant land cover database, and then, at the turn of the millennium, a higher-resolution land cover database that better meets domestic needs.

Since the early 2000s, he has been involved in the international team coordinating the European CLC program. In the period 2011-2015, he worked as a national expert at the European Environment Agency (EEA) in Copenhagen. He conducted training and database audits in 40 countries in Europe.
He retired in 2016, but has continued to work for the EEA ever since.

He actively participated in the activities of the Hungarian Astronautical Society (MTESZ MANT) and the Space Research Scientific Council of the Hungarian Space Research Agency. He gave numerous lectures at domestic and international scientific forums.