Category: Uncategorized

A great deal has happened since the last update in 2019(!). We have published  a number of papers, reports, and datasets during that time, which you can find on the Publications page, which is up to date. This website is also new.

Most importantly, however, are the career achievements of our team. There have been quite a few since the group started in 2017, so for now we’ll just focus on the last two years, starting with our first three PhD graduates. The first doctorate from our group was earned by Dr. Lei Song, who graduated in May, 2023, and is now a postdoctoral researcher at University of California Santa Barbara. She was followed by Drs. Sam Khallaghi and Mike Cecil, who graduated this past May. Sam is now a Research Associate at Clark’s Center for Geospatial Analytics (CGA), and Mike is a postdoc working with NASA Harvest. We are very proud of all of their achievements, and look forward to continued collaboration.

Beyond our three doctoral graduates, two of our MS-level advisees—Yao-Ting Yao and Hanxi Li—completed research theses since 2023, both focused on using CNNs to map croplands (in Planet and drone imagery, respectively). Yao-Ting graduated in May, 2023, and is now a full time Geospatial Software Developer at Clark’s CGA, while Hanxi graduated this year, and will be starting a PhD in Geography at George Mason University in August.

Several of our Research Assistants during the past two years also moved on to new and exciting careers. Emily Heltzel is a Geospatial Project Associate with TerraCarbon, and Ismail Alatise is a Mapping Coordinator with Opusing, LLC. Nguyen Ha is enrolled in the MS in Data Science at the University of Washington.

Besides the departures, Rahebe Abedi joined the group the year before last. Rahebe plans to use geoscience-aware deep learning and remote sensing to study soil carbon under different agricultural management practices. She joins Sitian Xiong, who is finishing up work related to the agricultural changes in Zambia and how those affect crop-climate sensitivity. We’ll write more about their work in a future post.

A new paper by Giroux et al., A high-frequency mobile phone data collection approach for research in social-environmental systems: Applications in climate variability and food security in sub-Saharan Africa, has just been published in Environmental Modeling & Software. The paper examines the potential for the collection of social-environmental data by farmers via short-message service (SMS), including the benefits in terms of timing and frequency of data collection, cost, and burden on respondents, as well as limitations with regards to data integration. The paper also presents the architecture for managing and processing heterogeneous data, tools to assess data quality, as well as visualization and analysis tools. It presents this work in the context of ongoing surveys of smallholder farmers in Kenya and Zambia. Access the paper here.

My colleagues and I have a new paper (accessible here) out today in the latest issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the theme of which is “Tropical Grassy Biomes: linking ecology, human use, and conservation“, edited by Drs. Caroline Lehmann and Catherine Parr (a fellow Fitztitute alum). Our paper uses a new land use tradeoff model that is designed to find optimal tradeoffs between agricultural expansion and environmental conservation in Zambia, a bellwether for agriculturally driven land use change in sub-Saharan Africa’s savannas (see our earlier paper on this subject for more background). The model is designed to allow users with competing land use interests to evaluate the costs and benefits of compromise. Encouragingly, we find that small compromises from the objective to convert the highest yielding areas can result in substantial reductions in carbon and biodiversity loss, as well as transportation costs.

See the news about our recent production run on the project website.

Last week I was in Italy to help teach a new course on UAS for Environmental Monitoring, which was organized by Salvatore Manfreda and Kelly Caylor, and run under the aegis of the University of Basilicata. Xurxo Gago from the Universitat de les Illes Balears provided instruction on multicopters and estimating crop water use from thermal imagery. We held classes in the ancient city of Matera (a remarkable place), while flight training and data collection practicals took place in farmland to the south near Metaponto. By the end of the week, 17 students successfully ran a data collection mission (using fixed-wing UAS from readytodrone.com), processed the resulting imagery into orthomosaics and DEMs, and did some initial data analysis, including a comparison of leaf area index measurements made in the field, UAS-derived BNDVI, and Landsat-derived NDVI (Marc Mayes from Brown University found that Landsat 8 had imaged the area during that week, making a very nice comparison). The student presentations and lectures are available here.  We hope to run this course again next summer, so please watch this space if you are interested in learning how to use UAS to close the gap between field and spaceborne observations. Click here for some photos or video.