Field Work

I'm preparing to leave for the Galapagos Islands (Ecuador) for the third time! This time I'll be collecting data for my dissertation from July 9 - August 16. You can follow along through my separate travel blog. And I'll likely post some updates here once I return home.

ABD: My New Status

I have just completed a big step toward receiving my PhD in Geography at UNC - I successfully passed my written exams, and a combined oral exam / dissertation proposal defense. I am now officially All But Dissertation (ABD) since I've completed my coursework (for both Geography and my IGERT program), passed my exams, and defended my proposal. So, the only thing left to do is write the dissertation.

Well, that's not completely true. First I need to go to the field (Isabela Island, Galapagos) and collect data to support my dissertation - based on my two previous visits to the Galapagos. Then I'll analyze the data that will provide results for my research hypotheses. And then I'll be writing my dissertation.

But it feels good to be one big step closer!

AAG 2008: Boston, MA

In April I presented a paper at the 2008 meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Boston, MA. This annual meeting is an opportunity for geographers in the public, private, and academic sectors to get together to discuss their research (theoretical and applied) and hot topics in Geography. Approximately 8,000 geographers attended this year's meeting!

My presentation titled, "Characterizing Land Use/Land Cover within the Galapagos Islands using an Object Based Image Analysis Approach" was included in a session of other papers on the Galapagos Islands. Despite being located more than 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, the human population of the Galapagos Islands has been steadily increasing in the last 15 years. Human population growth in the islands has been accompanied by increasing numbers of introduced plants and animals - some of which have become invasive (weeds) - which can alter land cover (what is on the ground) and land use (how the land is used).

The goal of my research was to characterize land use and land cover within an agricultural area of Isabela Island by applying an object-based image analysis (OBIA) approach to high spatial resolution satellite imagery. What does that mean? Well, I basically take satellite images of Isabela Island (just like you might see in Google Earth) which are divided into a grid of small cells called pixels ("a" in image above). I use specialized software that groups the pixels of the image into "objects" based on rules that I set ("b" in image above). For example, I might group together pixels that look green in the image. Then, I create and apply a set of rules to classify those objects - basically naming each one ("c" in image above). So, those green pixels that are grouped together might be generally called vegetation, and then broken down into sub-groups - like crops when they form a rectangular shape, or mangroves when they form small patches and are close to the coast. The tricky part is deciding on the rules, which should be based on knowledge about the study area and how the landscape is organized.

In this study I primarily focused on identifying a particularly aggressive invasive plant, guava (Psidium guajava) within the agricultural area where it was intentionally introduced and cultivated on local farms. The plant has now spread across the agricultural area and into the Galapagos National Park, and has become difficult to control (like many weeds elsewhere in the world). My results demonstrate that the OBIA approach is generally well-suited to classifying land use and land cover in the Galapagos Islands and for identifying guava - and may be useful for locating other invasive plants in high-resolution satellite imagery.

I plan on continuing work on this topic (among others) as part of my dissertation research over the coming year.

Malaria Project at SEDAAG

For several months I have been working on a project within the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon (NEA) that examines neighborhood effects on malaria among colonists living within the region. The preliminary study results are being presented this week (by my collaborator, Patricia E. Polo) at the SouthEastern Division of the Association of American Geographers (SEDAAG) meeting. You can check out our poster here.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of land use/land cover (for example - forest, water, pasture) and physical access to roads (e.g., distance to nearest road) on malaria cases reported by households in the NEA during 1999. We used secondary household demographic and socioeconomic data collected as part of the Ecuador Project at the UNC-Chapel Hill, and classified satellite imagery of the same area. Our results indicate that there are effects of physical access and land use/land cover on malaria incidence among colonists in our study area. In the near future, we will be including individual rather than household level data (e.g., age, sex, occupation, etc.) to control for malaria incidence and to improve our understanding of the relationship between environment and health in the NEA.

(And thanks to Tom Swayze at the UNC Carolina Population Center for his help creating the beautiful poster above).

Denali

Denali National Park is beautiful - and I got to see it! I work in some interesting places, but this was the kind of place that makes you want to return (soon). Here are some photos from that trip:

Tim & I on the stampede trail.

Snow-capped mountains in the background.

I love the clouds in this photo.

My attempt at a close-up shot.

Lots of layers there.

Group Work

Although I have been to several different coferences during my short graduate career, today we did something different at the sustainability conference - we split into small discussion groups to tackle issues and topics that we (as a participant group) posed to one another. The morning sessions concentrated on graduate training in sustainability (focusing on interdisciplinarity) and the afternoon on sustainability science. I am seriously beginning to believe that there's no room left for any other information in my brain - so this is my way of trying to empty a few thoughts from those discussions.

I think one of the more thought-provoking discussion groups I was in today talked about the disconnect that often exists between scientists in their 'ivory tower' and people who have to work in the 'real world' on sustainability issues. We had a fantastic discussion about why that divide exists and how we can better communicate our findings (as scientists) to decision-makers and people who have to implement policies on the ground, without compromising our research and our desire to do objective work. In another session we talk about interdisciplinary graduate education and whether students working on sustainability issues should be trained as interdisciplinary scientists or to work in interdisciplinary teams. And perhaps one of the most interesting, but mentally exhausting discussions was on mapping epistemologies - in other words, how we view the world and which aspects of the environment (or cultures) we choose to value shapes sustainability science. From the discussion many of us agreed that we often don't talk explicitly about our viewpoints within interdisciplinary teams, but that communication between scientists is important when working on interdisciplinary issues.

Phew - still a few more days to go here in Fairbanks. Tomorrow is going to be a wrap-up day to discuss how all of these themes on sustainability science fit together and where we'd like to take what we've done in this conference.

A Full Brain

North Carolina is a long way from Alaska. I know you may be thinking "you're a Geographer - didn't you realize that?" To which I would reply, "Yes, but it feels really far away, and I didn't necessarily expect that." Perhaps it was the fact that I was wearing shorts on Tuesday (it was 90+ degrees in Chapel Hill), and when I got to Fairbanks on Wednesday evening there was snow on the ground! Oh, and there are large snow-capped mountains, reindeer, a large oil pipeline, and fascinating people who have chosen to live in this frontier environment (although some of them challenge the notion that they live in a frontier).

But the snow and wildlife are just a fun benefit of my real reason for this trip. A colleague and I are here to talk with graduate students and faculty from across the country who are working on interdisciplinary projects related to sustainability. The idea is that this is a meeting of minds to talk about what sustainability is, what types of things should be sustained (elements of the environment, cultures, languages, etc.), how scientists can inform and drive studies of sustainability, and how to train graduate students to work in interdisciplinary teams around sustainability. Everyone at the conference is part of an NSF IGERT (National Science Foundation, Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) program (at a particular university) that in some way has a project that is relevant to sustainability - but the commonalities really stop there. There are people from the natural sciences and social sciences who study everything under the sun - from atmospheric chemistry and engineering of sustainable energy systems, to policy and population-environment interactions.

After the first day of talks and group discussions, my brain is full.