Miriam Tsalyuk, frequent GIF-er, wins an award from the Nature Conservancy!

Miriam Tsalyuk, who works with Wayne Getz, and who has been a GIF graduate student, was awarded this week the Oren Pollak Research Award from the Nature Conservancy. The grant aims to promote research on Grasslands restoration, management and conservation in California and Oregon. Miriam's project aims to develop satellite imagery-based measures to monitor residual dry matter (RDM) on rangeland conservation easements in California. RDM is a measure for moderate grazing pressure and ecosystem health, which is enforced as part of many easement conditions.  Currently, RDM monitoring is expensive and time consuming. The successful outcome of this project will contribute considerably to efficient monitoring of grasslands in California". Hers was the only project to be awarded in California this year! Congrats Miriam!

New postdoc: Jessica O'Connell

Our new postdoc, Jessica O'Connell, joined us earlier this year. She is working on the NASA wetland project. Jessica is a post doctoral researcher interested in discovering solutions to conservation issues in global change biology. Such conservation issues include disturbance effects, changing landscapes, changing species distributions, altered wetland ecosystem services and functions, and global climate change. She will be working on modeling soil carbon sequestration in freshwater wetlands in response to plant morphology and wetland management practices.

Lisa Schile wins best poster at the State of the Estuary conference!

Lisa won best student poster at the State of the Estuary conference! Her poster, focusing on one of her dissertation chapters, was entitled:"Effects of Simulated Sea-level Rise on the Growth of Two Tidal Wetland Plant Species". Lisa is working on her experiment in the image at right.  Congrats to Lisa!

Shasta Ferranto wins best student paper at APCG!

Shasta presented her work over the weekend at the APCG conference in San Francisco. She won the President's award for outstanding paper by a PhD student. Her paper covered one of her dissertation chapters: "California's forest and rangeland owners: a cluster analysis approach to understanding landowner behavior." Congrats to Shasta!

New visitor: Stefania Di Tommasso

Stefania has joined us for six months as a visiting student. She has a Master’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering (Politecnico di Bari), where she worked on change detection techinques using SAR data. She is currently enrolled in a 1 year Post Master degree study course in “satellite remote sensing technologies”. She will be working with us while here on the wetland carbon capture project.