Projects

Ongoing Projects

• Co-locating Areas of Increased Coastal Hazards and Critical Water Infrastructure
• Exploring Dynamic Agricultural Changes in Coastal Areas across the US
• Mapping California's Super-blooms using Remotely Sensed Imagery 
• Strengthening Community Self-Advocacy through Ecosystem Services Evaluation

Collaborations

• A Network-of-networks Framework for Leveraging Coordinated, Distributed Research Efforts to Understand Coastal Disturbance Impacts
• Unveiling US’s Water Reuse Media Trends: A Journey Across Temporal and Spatial Boundaries
• Vulnerability of Mobile Homes to Wildfires in Shasta County
• Analyzing the Distribution of Plant Communities Across Different Solar Radiation Environments at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve

Past Projects

• Algal Blooms in Frazil-Ice around Antarctica

Antarctic continental shelf waters are the most biologically productive in the Southern Ocean. Although satellite-derived algorithms report peak productivity during the austral spring/early summer, recent studies provide evidence for substantial late summer productivity that is associated with green colored frazil ice. Here we analyze daily Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer satellite images for February and March from 2003 to 2017 to identify green colored frazil ice hot spots. Green frazil ice is concentrated in 11 of the 13 major sea ice production polynyas, with the greenest frazil ice in the Terra Nova Bay and Cape Darnley polynyas. While there is substantial interannual variability, green frazil ice is present over greater than 300,000 km2 during March. Late summer frazil ice-associated algal productivity may be a major phenomenon around Antarctica that is not considered in regional carbon and ecosystem models.  Full Article in Gephysical Research Letters

• LakeTime

LakeTime: Automated Seasonal Scene Selection for Global Lake Mapping Using Landsat ETM+ and OLI. The Landsat series of satellites provide a nearly continuous, high resolution data record of the Earth surface from the early 1970s through to the present. The public release of the entire Landsat archive, free of charge, along with modern computing capacity, has enabled Earth monitoring at the global scale with high spatial resolution. With the large data volume and seasonality varying across the globe, image selection is a particularly important challenge for regional and global multitemporal studies to remove the interference of seasonality from long term trends. This paper presents an automated method for selecting images for global scale lake mapping to minimize the influence of seasonality, while maintaining long term trends in lake surface area dynamics. Using historical meteorological data and a simple water balance model, we define the most stable period after the rainy season, when inflows equal outflows, independently for each Landsat tile and select images acquired during that ideal period for lake surface area mapping. The images selected using this method provide nearly complete global area coverage at decadal episodes for circa 2000 and circa 2014 from Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) and Operational Land Imager (OLI) sensors, respectively. This method is being used in regional and global lake dynamics mapping projects, and is potentially applicable to any regional/global scale remote sensing application. Full Article in Remote Sensing

• SMAP Soil Moisture Data and Anthrax

Seasonality and Soil Properties of Livestock Anthrax Outbreaks in Bangladesh.