Coastal systems are subject to water quality degradation through excessive anthropogenic nutrient loading and climate change. Common problems include hypoxia (low dissolved oxygen) and harmful algal blooms that threaten ecosystems, recreation, and fisheries. While multiple organizations are tasked with monitoring such systems, sampling is often sparse and disjointed, limiting our ability to assess water quality…

Discover the latest advances in cloud-based geospatial processing with Google Earth Engine.  This forum covers the background of Earth Engine and presents datasets, platform capabilities, internal use cases, and a brief literature review.  The event should be of broad interest to anyone with a geospatial component to their research, teaching, or study. Note that this event precedes a…

The disproportionate concentration of human populations along coasts and river mouths make coastal basins hotspots of change. One of the most visible ways in which mounting human pressures translate into negative consequences for coastal and estuarine ecosystems is through changes in nutrient and phytoplankton concentrations. This presentation will highlight results from recent studies that applied…

Located in South Texas along the Gulf of Mexico coastline, the Conrad Blucher Institute for Surveying and Science at Texas A&M University (TAMU-CC) is actively integrating unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) to address regional problems. This forum presentation will provide an overview of such activities, including coastal and maritime reconnaissance, crop and rangeland scouting, and research…

Emergency managers rely on fast and accurate storm surge predictions from numerical models to make decisions and estimate damages during storm events. One of the challenges for such models is providing a high level of resolution along the coast without significantly increasing the computational time. Models with large domains, such as the Advanced CIRCulation (ADCIRC)…

Participatory research methods are increasingly used to better understand complex social-environmental problems and design solutions through diverse and inclusive stakeholder engagement. But, participatory research rarely engages stakeholders in co-development and interpretation of computational models that describe system dynamics essential for conceptualizing complex processes and envisioning scenarios of alternate action. Even fewer participatory projects have engaged…

Boreal and temperate forests have experienced substantial climate change over the last several decades.  However, understanding of how changes in climate are affecting these ecosystems is incomplete.  Remote sensing provides an important source of information that can help address this information gap.  We present results from recent studies that use three decades of Landsat imagery…

Autonomous vehicles will be here soon and will cause major changes when they arrive, similar to the building of the Interstates in the 1950s. AVs will bring safety, ease congestion, and provide mobility for many people who now find it difficult to travel. They will also erase many jobs, erode highway funding, and take customers…