Thanks to the generosity of Jack and Laura Dangermond, multiple travel expense awards are available to help qualified undergraduate and graduate students present GIS-related work at conferences and workshops. Calls for applications for Dangermond Travel Scholarships are usually made in August (Aug. 15-22) for the Fall Quarter, December (Dec. 15—22) for the Winter Quarter, and March (Mar. 15—22) for the Spring and Summer Quarters. Five grad students and one undergrad successfully applied for funding for the Winter Quarter expense awards.
Mike Alonzo will be presenting a paper titled “Fusing imaging spectroscopy and lidar for urban forest inventory” at the AAG Annual Meeting, 24-28 February, 2012, in New York, NY: “In this paper, we explore improvements in urban tree inventory through the fusion of Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) data and discrete, high point density LiDAR. Our objective is to evaluate the potential of combined LiDAR and AVIRIS data for discriminating plant functional types (PFT) in the urban environment. To facilitate this research, we utilize a coregistered dataset that overlays 4m resolution AVIRIS and high point density LiDAR, acquired over Santa Barbara, California.”
Sara Baguskas was awarded funds to attend the California Native Plant Society Meeting, 10-14 January, 2012, in San Diego where she will present a poster titled “Tree Mortality in a California Coastal Fog Forest”: “Bishop pine is a relict and endemic species restricted to the fog-belt of coastal California and Baja California. Our ability to predict shifts in the distribution of this and other coastal tree species in a warmer, drier, and perhaps less foggy climate requires a mechanistic understanding of how this species utilizes available moisture. In this research, we addressed these questions: 1) Does summertime fog alleviate drought stress and reduce the risk of mortality of Bishop pine? 2) Does fog impact Bishop pine water status similarly across age classes? This research will increase understanding of the response of trees to fog and improve predictions of the distribution of coastal forests.”
Micah Brachman will also be at the AAG, presenting a paper titled “Tsunami Evacuation Route Accessibility in Thailand.” Abstract: “The Andaman coast in Thailand was devastated by the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004, with more than 5,000 people killed and extensive damage to infrastructure. In response, the Thai government designated tsunami evacuation routes on many islands affected by this disaster. These evacuation routes are generally well marked and follow existing paths and roadways to higher ground. Yet many of these routes have significant impedance along the way that may hinder egress to safer areas. Vertical evacuation plans that utilize flood resistant structures may be a better option for protecting people from future tsunamis.”
Pam Dalal’s paper for the AAG is titled “Measuring the Evolution of Accessibility in a Dynamic Urban Landscape.” According to her abstract, “Underlying urban processes, like suburbanization or zoning policies, can significantly alter the spatial structure of residences and opportunities, and thereby accessibility of an urban environment. The success and longevity of planning policies can be measured through the increase or decline in accessibility over time for multiple geographic scales and for varying populations. However, representation of the built environment is sparse but, if available, is often recorded at course resolutions and usually only every ten years. This study uses observed activity participation from the first nine waves of the Puget Sound Transportation Panel (1989-2000) as a proxy representation of the built environment. This analysis extrapolates the intensity and direction of activity participation in the Puget Sound region, and provides a qualitative interpretation on the evolution of accessibility through geovisualization techniques.”
Geoffrey Fouad is in the UCSB-SDSU joint PhD program and will discuss “Environmental Controls of Watershed-scale Vegetation Phenology in Water-limited Ecosystems” at the AAG. According to his abstract, “Despite the importance of water availability, the variation of environmental controls on vegetation phenology in water-limited ecosystems remains undocumented at the watershed scale. The purpose of this study is to determine how the environmental controls on vegetation phenology vary across a sparsely developed southern California watershed occupied by water-limited ecosystems. Data visualization techniques are exploited to cluster large volumes of SVI data calculated from MODIS products retrieved over ten years in the Santa Cruz watershed.”
Undergraduate Alex Hammer-Barulich is a fourth-year physical geography and political science double major, and he will present “Two Case Studies for Volunteered Geographic Information Techniques and Best Practices” at the AAG. “While volunteered geographic information is a relatively new concept within spatial studies, it has potential to generate large amount of data quickly by utilizing the knowledge of a community. This project compares different platforms available for implementing effective volunteered geographic information (VGI) websites. The purpose of the project was to better understand the development process behind creating browser-based VGI instances, before creating two VGI-websites focused on user-submitted memories.”
