Dr. Paul Byrne | Assistant Professor | Dept. of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences | NC State University Abstract: Until 2008 Mercury was a poorly understood planet, with less than half of it imaged by visiting spacecraft. NASA's MESSENGER mission to Mercury returned global image and topographic data and – together with gravity, spectral, and compositional…
Dr. James Wickham | Senior Research Biologist | US Environmental Protection Agency Abstract: Preserving and restoring the world’s forests is regarded as having a positive (cooling) effect on a warming climate. However, some have cautioned against reforestation and afforestation as a climate-warming-mitigation strategy outside of tropical regions, without considering the potentially counteracting biophysical effects (albedo, transpiration)…
Nate Irwin | Lead Developer | Trailhead Labs, San Francisco, CA Abstract: For a number of reasons, the relevance of GIS, as we know it, is waning. Geography, on the other hand, is alive and well. In fact, it’s so pervasive that you’d be hard-pressed to find a tech company whose portfolio doesn’t include it in…
Dr. Budhendra Bhaduri | Geographic Information Science and Technology Group | Oak Ridge National Laboratory Abstract: Increasing resolutions of geographic data provides a compelling motivation for spatiotemporal analysis of dynamic data streams. The challenge in processing large volumes of high resolution earth observation and simulation data by traditional GIS has been compounded by the drive…
Dr. Susan Ustin | Professor of Environmental and Resource Sciences in the Dept. of Land and Natural Resources | Director of the Center for Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing (CSTARS) | University of California Davis Abstract: The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California is the largest estuary on the west coast of North and South America and…
Dr. Stacy Supak | Teaching Assistant Professor | Center for Geospatial Analytics | NC State University Abstract: With President Obama’s 2013 Executive Order, an estimated 20 million government-generated datasets could be eligible for release to the public. These data have massive potential to inform and support solutions to our nation’s most pressing challenges. At the…
Dr. Joshua Gray | Assistant Professor | Forestry & Environmental Resources | NC State University Kalman Filters are used in a wide variety of signal processing applications to fuse multiple noisy signals and forecast system states. Here, we investigate the potential of Kalman Filters to fuse multisource, multispectral satellite imagery. In particular: obtaining robustly gap-filled…
Forensic analyses are often concerned with identifying the spatial source of biological residue. Using recent advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies, dust collected from nearly any object can be shown to harbor DNA fragments from thousands of bacteria and fungi species which may be informative of the source of the dust. We show that training collections…
Assessing water quality along rivers is vital for watershed management. The Bayesian Maximum Entropy method of modern geostatistics provides a powerful framework to model the space/time variability of water quality and perform a statistical assessment of all river miles. This talk presents joint work with Prahlad Jat that describes how river distances and flow can…
CyberGIS represents an interdisciplinary field combining advanced computing and cyberinfrastructure, geographic information science and systems (GIS), spatial analysis and modeling, and a number of geospatial domains (e.g., emergency management, smart cities, and the nexus of food, energy, and water systems) to enable broad scientific and technological advances. It has also emerged as new-generation GIS based on holistic…