Mehmet Özgür Çelik, a student in the Department of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems at Mersin University's Institute of Science, has been awarded the "2025 Best Ph.D. Thesis Award – Second Place" for his doctoral thesis in the IEEE GRSS Turkey Graduate Thesis Competition organized by the IEEE GRSS Turkey Chapter.

His doctoral thesis, titled "Spatial Estimation of Suitable Agricultural Areas for Subtropical Fruit Cultivation Based on Climatic Effects Using Machine Learning," achieved this significant success as a result of studies supervised by Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali Kurt and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Osman Orhan.

This study, which correlates machine learning-based spatial analysis approaches with climatic effects, once again demonstrates the importance of remote sensing and geographic information systems in agricultural planning and sustainable land management.

We congratulate our student Mehmet Özgür Çelik on this significant achievement and wish him continued success in his academic career. We also extend our gratitude to our advisor, Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali Kurt, for their valuable contributions to this work. We would like to thank Mehmet Ali Kurt and the second advisor, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Osman Orhan. We also extend our gratitude to the IEEE GRSS Türkiye Chapter and the jury members for their contributions to the organization.