Ross provides strategic direction and oversight for the Center’s programs and initiatives in research and academics. He works across disciplinary boundaries to develop innovative analytics for scenario-based modeling and visualization of alternative futures. Ross is a Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Professor and faculty member in the College of Natural Resources. In 2019, he was named NC State’s Goodnight Distinguished Professor of Geospatial Analytics. He has been principal investigator of numerous research grants totaling over $15M, including two decades of continuous funding from the National Science Foundation. His projects catalyze the creation of interdisciplinary teams of data scientists––from the natural and social sciences, engineering, and design––who are collaborating on grand societal challenges, such as controlling the spread of infectious disease and creating smart and connected cities. According to Ross, “everything is spatial and location matters in science, society and decision-making.” Ross received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also served as president of the US-International Association of Landscape Ecology from 2016 to 2018.

 

Roles

• Instructors
• Leadership

Publications

• Modeling restorative potential of urban environments by coupling viewscape analysis of lidar data with experiments in immersive virtual environments (2020)
• Modeling the impacts of urbanization on watershed-scale gross primary productivity and tradeoffs with water yield across the conterminous United States (2020)
• Protection status and proximity to public‐private boundaries influence land use intensification near U.S. parks and protected areas (2020)
• Spatiotemporal patterns and drivers of soil contamination with heavy metals during an intensive urbanization period (1989–2018) in southern China (2020)
• A disturbance weighting analysis model (DWAM) for mapping wildfire burn severity in the presence of forest disease (2019)
• Anticipating trade-offs between urban patterns and ecosystem service production: Scenario analyses of sprawl alternatives for a rapidly urbanizing region (2019)
• Compound disease and wildfire disturbances alter opportunities for seedling regeneration in resprouter-dominated forests (2019)
• Direct and indirect effects of forest microclimate on pathogen spillover (2019)
• Forecasting and control of emerging infectious forest disease through participatory modelling (2019)
• Integrating multi-sensor remote sensing and species distribution modeling to map the spread of emerging forest disease and tree mortality (2019)

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