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

• Geospatial contrasts between natural and human-altered barrier island systems: Core Banks and Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, USA (2018)
• Tangible topographic modeling for landscape architects (2018)
• Observation and modeling of the evolution of an ephemeral storm-induced inlet: Pea Island Breach, North Carolina, USA (2018)
• Tangible geospatial modeling for collaborative solutions to invasive species management (2017)
• Immersive tangible geospatial modeling (2016)
• Quantifying an aquifer nitrate budget and future nitrate discharge using field data from streambeds and well nests (2016)
• Tangible landscape: cognitively grasping the flow of water (2016)
• Overland flow analysis using time series of sUAS- derived elevation models (2016)
• Fort Fisher, NC past and present: A geospatial analysis using LiDAR and GIS (2016)
• Quantifying the fate of agricultural nitrogen in an unconfined aquifer: Stream-based observations at three measurement scales (2016)

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