Peter is a Geographer (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2257-0517).
In 2000 he became the first person to join the newly founded german GRASS User Society (renamed in 2008: FOSSGIS.de).
He actively advocates FOSSGIS in Science in the Earth and Space Informatics (ESSI) chapters of both the European Geoscience Union (EGU) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and has been organizing OSGeo Townhall events at the annual EGU General Assembly since 2014.

He initiated the acquisition and preservation of OSGeo releated scientific film and conference recordings at the German National Library's of Science and Technology (TIB) TIB AV-Portal, including the GRASS 1987 video. The current (2017) annual acquisition rate is about 100 hours of OSGeo-related conference recordings.

During FOSS4G-Europe 2015 he participated in the launch of the OSGeo Open Geoscience Committee, which he is currently chairing (since August 2015) together with Maxi Cannata.

He served as a member of the GRASS GIS steering committee from 2016 - 2021.

In 2017, Peter and Maxi were appointed OSGeo Vice Presidents for Open GeoScience bei the OSGeo Board, while negotiating the Memorandum of Understanding with the American Geophysical Society.

In 2019, Peter initiated the MOSS search and rescue effort, which led to the recovery of the MOSS codebase and MOSS being recognized as a OSGeo heritage project.

In 2021, he supported 16 OSGeo projects to mint Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for their software repositories.

Peter served as chapter editor for the open source GIS chapter of the second edition of the Springer Handbook of Geographic Information,released in June 2022 (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53125-6_30).