Former Students, Staff and Visitors

Graduate Students

Anu Kramer, PhD 2015

Ph.D. Graduate Student 2010-2015. Dissertation title: Not seeing the forest for the points: Novel LiDAR metrics elucidate forest structure. Anu was co-advised with Scott Stephens. 

Shufei Lei, PhD 2014

Ph.D. Graduate Student 2009-2014. Dissertation title: Mapping Webs of Information, Conversation, and Social Connections: Evaluating the Mechanics of Collaborative Adaptive Management in the Sierra Nevada Forests. Shufei was co-advised with Alastair Iles. Shufei's website.

Miriam Tsalyuk, PhD 2014

Ph.D. Graduate Student 2012-2014. Dissertation title: Vegetation - Herbivore dynamics in Rangeland ecosystems: Geospatial modelling for savanna and wildlife conservation in California and Namibia. Miriam was co-advised with Wayne Getz. Miriam's website.

Sarah Lewis, PhD 2013

Ph.D. Graduate Student 2008 - 2013. Dissertation title: Geospatial strategies to optimize placement of advanced bioenergy crops in marginal landscapes. Her research explores how remote sensing and GIS technologies can optimize the placement of cellulosic biofuels in marginal landscapes.

Marek Jakubowski, PhD 2012

Ph.D. Graduate Student 2006-2012. Dissertation title: Using lidar in wildfire ecology of the California Sierra-Nevada forests. He is interested in Remote sensing, lidar, forests, Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project. Marek's webpage. Marek's publications.

Lisa Schile, PhD 2012

Ph.D. Graduate Student, 2007-2012. Dissertation title: Tidal Wetland Vegetation in the San Francisco Bay Estuary: Modeling Species Distributions with Sea-Level Rise. She is interested in wetland ecology, GIS & Remote sensing, climate change modeling. Lisa's webpage.

Shasta Ferranto, PhD 2012

Ph.D. Graduate Student 2007-2012. Dissertation title: Private Lands, Public Goods: Engaging Landowners in Ecosystem Management. She is interested in GIS, Land Use Change, Private Land Conservation, and Public Participation. She was co-advised with Lynn Huntsinger. Shasta's webpage.

Esther Zeledon, PhD 2010

Ph.D. Graduate Student 2005-2010. Dissertation title: The Effect of War and Its Aftermath on Land Use and Land Cover in Jinotega Nicaragua. Department of Energy, Global Change Environmental Research Fellowship and UC Berkeley Graduate Opportunity Fellowship recipient. 

Tim De Chant, PhD 2009

Ph.D. Graduate Student 2004-2009. Dissertation title: "Merging tree physiology and landscape ecology: examining the effects of urbanization on California’s oak woodlands." Tim is currently Science Writer and Editor for the Kellogg Insight at the Kellogg School of Management.

Karin Tuxen, PhD 2007

Ph.D. Graduate Student 2002-2007, staff 2001-2002. Dissertation Title: "Multi-scale functional mapping of tidal marsh vegetation for restoration monitoring." Karin is interested in Wetland restoration, Landscape ecology, Remote sensing. Karin is now with Google Earth Outreach.

Desheng Liu, PhD 2006

Ph.D. Graduate Student 2001-2006. Dissertation Title: "Spatio-temporal Mapping and Modeling of A New Forest Disease Spread Using Remote Sensing and Spatial Statistics." Desheng is interested in Remote Sensing, Spatial Statistics, Sudden Oak Death. Desheng is an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University (in Geography and Statistics) in the Fall of 2006. Desheng was co-advised with Peng Gong. 

Kristin Byrd, PhD 2005

Ph.D. Graduate Student 2000-2005. Graduated, Spring 2005. Dissertation Title: "Temporal and spatial linkages between watershed land use and wetland vegetation response in the Elkhorn Slough watershed, Monterey County, CA." Kristin is interested in restoration ecology, tidal wetlands, remote sensing, GIS. Graduated Spring 2005. She is currently Physical Scientist at the USGS Western Geographic Science Center. Recent recipient of a NASA New Investigator Program.

Qinghua Guo, PhD 2005

Ph.D. Graduate Student 2001-2005. Graduated Summer 2005.  Dissertation Title: "Development of Geospatial Techniques for Ecological Analysis -- a Case Study of Sudden Oak Death in California."   Qinghua is interesed in landscape ecology, quantitative ecology, remote sensing, GIS. Currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Engineering at UC Merced. Qinghua was co-advised with John Battles.

Matt Wacker, M.A. 2002

M.A. Graduate Student 2000-2002.Thesis Title: "Land use vegetation change on El Dorado County, CA rangelands: implications for rangeland conservation." Matt's research focused on landcover change, GIS, vernal pools. Currently Easement Steward at MALT. 

Postdoctoral Scholars

Patrick McIntyre

Patrick was a postdoc with David Ackerly and Maggi Kelly with the Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology. He is using a historic data set on California vegetation from the 1920's and 1930's to understand changes to California's flora in the 20th Century.  The Wieslander Vegetation Type Mapping Project documented vegetation throughout California using plot based surveys, photographs and collected specimens that are valuable tools for understanding recent changes to California's flora and helping to predict future changes.  This dataset will form part of UC Berkeley's  Predictive Biosystems Informatics Engine for studying biological responses to global change.  Patrick's website.

Jessica O'Connell

Jessica O'Connell, joined us in 2012. She worked with Krisin Byrd and I on the NASA wetland project. Jessica is 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 worked on modeling soil carbon sequestration in freshwater wetlands in response to plant morphology and wetland management practices.

Feng Zhao

Feng Zhao will work on North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) project. By using large stacks of Landsat data spanning from 1972–2005, the NAFD project has characterized 23 sample locations across the U.S. Those characterizations were used to create statistical summaries and forest change maps that will enable the calculation of forest biomass and the rate of biomass loss. The specific objectives of his work are to:

1) Conduct a comprehensive annual, wall-to-wall analysis of US disturbance history Between1985-2010 (Landsat Thematic Mapper) time period,
2) Examine variation in post-disturbance forest recovery trajectories recorded in the time series records, using repeat measurements from FIA plot data.

Preliminary work has shown that approximately 30% of all partial clearing is missed when Landsat data is used for disturbance mapping. Given that about 60% of harvest occurs through partial clearing (Smith et al., 2009), this substantial underestimation error would greatly impact models or analyses of carbon dynamics for the US. To reduce uncertainties in carbon dynamics for NAFD project, it is crucial to better integrate the partial clearing component into analysis. The Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project (SNAMP) project, a joint effort by the University of California, state and federal agencies, and the public to study management of forest lands in the Sierra Nevada, could provide several sites for the calibration and validation of partial clearing for the NAFD project.

Lina Cao

Lina joined us from the Geography Department at University of Utah where she conducted her dissertation work on anthropogenic habitat disturbance effect on hantavirus dynamics in deer mice using remote sensing, GIS, and a spatially explicit agent-based model. She received M.A. in Geography at San Diego State University where she worked on mapping and updating undocumented immigrant trails along the U.S.-Mexico border using airborne digital multispectral Imagery. She is interested in spatial epidemiology, spatial database, remote sensing and GIS applications. She was working on the Our Space project.

Oliver Sonnentag

Oliver worked on the Methane in the Delta project. Oliver received his PhD from the University of Toronto, Department of Geography and Planning. Oliver's dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Jing Chen focused on peatland hydrology and carbon cycle modelling in a remote sensing-driven modelling framework. His first degree was a Master's degree in Applied Geology from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. Following a stint as a GIS technician and consultant for a surveying company, he pursued a postgraduate Master's degree in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He is currently a postdoc with Dr. Richardson at Harvard.

Alan DiVittorio

Allen worked on the EBI Biofuels project with Norm Miller. Allen's dissertation focused on leaf-level spectrometry and forest ecology.

Undergraduates

Sophie Kolding

Sophie has a B.A. from UC Berkeley in Marine Science from the Earth and Planetary Science Department at UC Berkeley. Her interests are oceanography and sediment core research. Her hobbies are hiking, camping and snowboarding.

Jonah Lipsitt

Jonah was a Geography student at Cal, working with us on modeling biofuel potential mapping.

John Dingman

Forestry Honors Project 2006-2007. Worked on a SPUR project with the VTM data.

Susan Nawbury

Worked with Tim DeChant and me on "Oaks on the Edge: Ecophysiological Analysis of Coast Live Oaks in the Wildland-Urban Interface." This project seeks to understand the impact of urban development on the physiology of coast live oak trees in California. Susan is in charge of measuring and analyzing the ring widths of the prepared coast live oak cores and correlating the changes in ring width with detailed development histories and weather data from the past 50 years.

Andrea Kristof

was working with Lisa Schile and me on "Isotopic characterization of San Francisco Bay tidal wetland vegetation, invertebrates and fish." This project examines changes to sea level and salinity regimes due to climate change that will likely have an impact on the SF Bay estuary. Andrea will be involved with the field sampling in estuarine marshes. The researcher will also process samples of vegetation, invertebrates, and fish.

Daniel Song

was working with the GIF and me on "The Living Campus: Mapping UC Berkeley's Ornamental Trees." Daniel is helping us map the location and condition of the beautiful ornamental trees on campus using GPS and GIS.

Visitors

Lauren Heumann

Lauren is a master’s student getting dual degrees in City Planning and Public Health. Her focus is on food access and health and the role of GIS as a tool to measure and overcome inequities in food access and health outcomes.  She was working with us on the Our Space project.

Jose Pena-Barragan

Jose comes from the Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (IAS-CSIC, Cordoba, Spain). He works on remote sensing applications for developing site-specific weed management strategies in the context of precision agriculture. His current project focuses on the testing of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for collecting remote images in crop-weed systems and the evaluation of object-based image analysis techniques for weed seedling discrimination.

Celia Garcia

Celia visits us from Madrid, and is working on landscape ecology applications in the SNAMP program. She is currently examining methods to characterize the vertical structure of forests using lidar data.

Alessandro Montaghi

Alessandro visited us from Firenze, Italy, and worked on LiDAR applications in Sierra Nevada forests. In early 2010, he completed his dissertation, entitled: "A comparison of statistical methods for estimating forest standing volume from light detection and ranging data (lidar)."

Ken-ichi Ueda

MS School for Information Managmement. Participatory webGIS. Projects included Vegetation Type Mapping and Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project.

Oscar Fernandez-Manso

Visitor, Summer 2007. PhD student from University of Leon-Ponferrada Campus. Forest engineering, remote sensing, OBIA.

Travis Freed

M.A. Graduate Student 2001-2004. Graduated Fall 2004 (co-chaired with Scott Stephens). GIS, remote sensing, fire ecology, fire modeling.

Faith Kearns

PhD student and Staff Research Associate 2001-04. Graduated Summer 2003. 

Javier Lozano

Visitor, Fall 2005. Ph.D. student from University of Leon, Spain. Interested in Fire, fire ecology, landscape ecology and GIS/RS. Currently working with Demios in Spain.

Staff

Jason Su

Jason is a scholar in the Geographic Information System – Health and Environmental Analysis Laboratory (GIS-HEAL), School of Public Health. Dr. Su specializes in personal air pollution monitoring and fixed site saturation monitoring, personal momentary location tracking, air pollution exposure modeling, environmental epidemiology, physical activity and the built environment research. He utilizes his strong background in Geographic Information System (GIS) (first PhD), remote sensing (second PhD) and Microsoft developer certification (a member of MCAD - Microsoft Certified Application Developer) for innovative geo-spatiotemporal model development and urban environment studies. He has been key personnel and project co-investigator for more than 10 projects including projects funded by Health Canada, Health Effects Institute, California Air Resources Board, California Energy Commission, California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, University of California Transportation Center, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institute of Health. He has published more than 40 scientific papers and won the best paper issued by American Chemical Society. Living on a small island in the San Francisco Bay, Dr. Su spends most of his off-office hours with two sons and wife sunbathing or biking on the beach.

Sam Blanchard

Sam joined us from the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University where he received a B.A. in Geography and a M.A. in Geographic Information Science specializing in urban geography, land use / land cover change analysis, modeling, and mapping and geomorphic change analysis. He has worked for Clark Labs for Cartographic Technologies and Geographic Analysis, the Human-Environment Regional Observatory (HERO) Massachusetts Forest Monitoring Program, and the Southern Yucatan Peninsular Region (SYPR) Project in environmental disturbance and forest monitoring. He has worked on the CITRIS funded groundwater database project and the carbon sequestration in wetlands project. Sam's website.

John Connors

John joins us from Clark University Geography Department where he worked on land-use mapping and map comparison methods, specifically object-based and fuzzy classification. He has been working on the Sudden Oak Death project, and the Our Space project.

Brent Pedersen

Part-time Programmer/Analyst. 2006. WebGIS programming. Worked on the OakMapper Project.

Casey Cleve

Part-time SRA (shared with the Fire Center), 2006-2007. Remote sensing/GIS/GPS. Projects included Wetlands and Greenhouse Gases in the Delt. Currently GIS manager at Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District.

Elsie Windes

Undergrad assistant.

Julian Metcalf

SRA II, 2006-2007. Remote sensing/GIS/GPS. Projects included Wetlands, Sudden Oak Death and Vegetation Type Mapping.

Mindy Syfert

SRA II. Remote sensing/GIS/GPS. Projects included Pierce Disease, Sudden Oak Death and Vegetation Type Mapping.

Lauren McGee

Intern. Undergraduate Integrative Biology major. Projects included Vegetation Type Mapping.

Eric Waller

SRA II. Now working with Max Moritz.

David Shaari

SRA II 2002-2005. Remote sensing/GIS/GPS. Projects included mapping Sudden Oak Death and Pierce's Disease, as well as beetle damage assessment. Currently GIS Manager for California State Parks Department.

Henna Chou

Intern Summer 2002. Sudden Oak Death. Returned to undergraduate research at Iowa State University.

Wanxiao Sun

Post Doctoral Researcher Fall 2001. Sudden Oak Death. Currently Assistant Professor in the Geography Department in Southern Illinois University.