People joining Kellylab in Fall 2012

This fall we'll have a few new faces around.

Our new graduate student Kelly Easterday comes from UCLA Geography department. She's also been working with NASA. Welcome Kelly!

Patrick McIntyre is a new postdoc, working with David Ackerly and me on the Keck project. He'll be focusing on the VTM database work. We look forward to his arrival in September!

Stefania Di Tommaso is returning! She did such a nice job with the wetlands work when she was last here. Now she wil be continuing the lidar work that Marek and Feng began on the SNAMP project.

Welcome!

Desheng Liu awarded tenure

Congratulations to Desheng Liu, former lab member, who has been granted tenure at Ohio State University.

Read about it here. While he was here Desheng was instrumental in developing novel spatio-temporal analytical methods for mapping and understanding disease spread in California forests. He recieved a MS in statistics while completing his PhD. Hooray for Desheng!

CDC write-up of Ellen Kersten's work

Ellen's work on food stores was highlighted by the journal Preventing Chronic Disesase. Her article “Small Food Stores and Availability of Nutritious Foods: A Comparison of Database and In-Store Measures, Northern California, 2009,” was the winner of the journal’s 2012 Student Research Contest. They also provide a podcast with an interview with Ellen. For more on her paper, see here.

Stefania graduates from Bari!

Final examination for degree of Master in "Tecnologie per il Telerilevamento Spaziale" (Remote Sensing Technology) ed. 2010/11

28 May 2012 (9:30 am), within the Physics Department of Bari University, in the Multimedia room (Campus Via Amendola 173, Bari), will take place the examination to the Diploma of Master (Summer session)

Studentessa: Ing. Stefania Di Tommaso

Tirocinio svolto presso il: University of California – Berkeley – USA. Dept. of Environmental Sciences, Policy and Management

 Titolo della tesi:  Wetland vegetation mapping and biomass estimation from WorldView2 data in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, California, USA

Tutor per l’ente ospitante: Prof. Kelly Maggi and Prof. Kristin Byrd

Tutor per l’ente promotore: Prof. Luciano Guerriero

Abstract:  During my six months internship at the Kelly Lab -ESPM -Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley, I had the opportunity to work on a state-founded three-years research project called ‘Carbon Capture Wetland Farming (CCWF)’ lead by the U.S. Geological Survey and in collaboration with UC Berkeley. The project tests a range of experimental, optimal and natural environment condition in a farm-scale experimental wetland on Twitchell Island in the western Delta, California, with the goal of optimizing land accretion and net sequestration of greenhouse gas, combining field and remote sensing techniques for estimating above and belowground productivity of wetland vegetation. I focused on the processing of high resolution (1.8 meter), 8-band WorldView2 Digital Globe satellite data and creation of land cover maps using ENVI-ITT and IDRISI-Taiga Hard and Soft Classifiers algorithms in order to better understand the complex compositions of the experimental area. We also used linear regression models to find a relationship able to predict plant biomass in all the wetland area. For this purpose we evaluate the correlation coefficient between sampled Biomass data and new vegetation indices obtained testing several WV2 band combinations.

Lisa, Shasta and Marek are graduating!

Three of our PhD students are moving on this year to greater things. See shots of them in action (and some of their field sites and work) above. Each came to Cal with different skills and interests, and each will leave with new insights into how California's social-ecological systems function. Each addresses a changing natural system under some scale of management. Their work collectively spans nearly the breadth of California's landscapes: wetlands, forest and rangelands; and individually, each has developed novel methods for analyzing geospatial, ecological and survey data. Lisa Schile's dissertation Tidal wetland vegetation in the San Francisco Bay Estuary: modeling species distribution with sea-level rise looks at the changes our SF Bay marshes will likely face in this century through rigorous field experimentation, remote sensing and spatial modeling. Shasta Ferranto's dissertation Private Lands, Public Goods: Engaging Landowners in Ecosystem Management uses survey methods and statistical clustering to examine how the patchwork of owners of Californian forests and rangeland have many different motivations for owning and managing land, and asks what this might mean for large-scale ecosystem management. Shasta's papers are here.  Marek Jakubowski's dissertation Using LiDAR in wildfire ecology of the California Sierra-Nevada forests shows how lidar technology and geospatial data and analysis can be an integrator across environemental science, adding power and detail to analyses of fire, wildlife habitat, and canopy structure. They've taught us all much, and it will be sad to see them leave. Stay in touch!