Use of NASA Open Data for Land Cover Change Monitoring and Vegetation Height Modeling

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Speaker: Dr. Emil Cherrington, Thematic Lead, Ecosystem & Carbon Management, SERVIR Science Coordination Office at NASA; Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Earth System Science Center.

Hosted by the Geospatial Graduate Student Organization and part of GIS Week at NC State.

Summary: This two-part studio activity will focus on the use of open data from the NASA / USGS Landsat series of satellites for mapping land cover change, and the use of spaceborne LiDAR data from the GEDI instrument for estimating vegetation height. This activity will focus on the use of the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, in conjunction with the LandTrendr algorithm (Kennedy et al. 2010, Kennedy et al. 2018), and a regression-based vegetation height upscaling technique developed by Ujaval Gandhi of the company Spatial Thoughts. While the specific geographic focus of the studio activity will be Mesoamerica, participants will be able to adjust the study domains to their respective areas of interest.

About the speaker: Emil Cherrington is a Research Scientist at the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and serves as the Regional Science Coordination Lead for West Africa for the SERVIR program of NASA and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He has almost nineteen years of professional experience working with geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing, with his work focusing on the use of such technologies for land cover change detection, ecosystem monitoring, disaster response, and integrated water resource management. He holds a joint Ph.D. in forest ecology (with an emphasis in remote sensing) from AgroParisTech (France) and the Technische Universität Dresden (Germany), under the auspices of a fellowship from the European Commission’s Erasmus Mundus program. He holds a master’s degree in forest resources from the University of Washington’s College of Forest Resources (where he was an Organization of American States Fellow) and a bachelor’s degree in biology from Loyola University Maryland.