As Associate Director of Geovisualization, Helena provides strategic leadership for the center’s research agenda, especially work that uses Tangible Landscape. Helena develops geospatial analytics to investigate coastal evolution, soil erosion control, natural hazards, and sustainable land management. Tangible geospatial modeling environments, dynamic simulations of landscape processes, and analyses of LiDAR time series data are some of the research frontiers she is advancing. Her interests also include Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) remote sensing and open source software development. Helena is a member of the OSGeo Foundation and the Open Source GRASS GIS Project Steering Committee, and is co-author of the first book on Open Source GRASS GIS.

Roles

• Fellows
• Instructors
• Leadership

Publications

• Modeling restorative potential of urban environments by coupling viewscape analysis of lidar data with experiments in immersive virtual environments (2020)
• Open Geospatial Software and Data: A Review of the Current State and A Perspective into the Future (2020)
• Projecting Urbanization and Landscape Change at Large Scale Using the FUTURES Model (2019)
• Visualization of Pedestrian Density Dynamics Using Data Extracted from Public Webcams (2019)
• r.sim.terrain 1.0: a landscape evolution model with dynamic hydrology (2019)
• Geospatial contrasts between natural and human-altered barrier island systems: Core Banks and Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, USA (2018)
• Observation and modeling of the evolution of an ephemeral storm-induced inlet: Pea Island Breach, North Carolina, USA (2018)
• Tangible topographic modeling for landscape architects (2018)
• Tangible geospatial modeling for collaborative solutions to invasive species management (2017)
• Fort Fisher, NC past and present: A geospatial analysis using LiDAR and GIS (2016)

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