UCSB-SDSU Joint Program Researchers Earn Million Dollar NASA Grant

A collaborative project between San Diego State University, UC Santa Barbara, George Washington University, and the University of Ghana has netted a $993,000 grant from NASA’s Interdisciplinary Research in Earth Science Program. The research project, “The Urban Transition in Ghana and Its Relation to Land Cover and Land Use Change Through Analysis of Multi-scale and Multi-temporal Satellite Image Data,” is led by PI Doug Stow (SDSU); Co-PIs include John Weeks and Li An (SDSU), David Lopez-Carr (UCSB), Ryan Engstrom (George Washington University), Foster Mensah (University of Ghana), and SDSU-UCSB Geography PhD students Magdalena Benza-Fiocco and Sory Toure.

Professor Lopez-Carr will assist in the analysis of population and health surveys in relation to the land cover and land use change. Specifically, “I will help analyze the 1993, 1998, 2003, and 2008 Ghana Demographic and Health Surveys in order to examine the components of demographic change that we hypothesize to be the drivers of interregional and intra-urban LCULC.” (See the UCSB Office of Public Affairs news release, “NASA-Funded Research to Examine Urban Transitions, Land Change in Ghana,” here.)

The NASA grant solicitation “offers opportunities for researchers to initiate new and successor interdisciplinary research investigations within NASA’s Interdisciplinary Research in Earth Science (IDS) program. Proposed research investigations should aim to advance our understanding of Earth system variability, the forcing factors that impact the Earth system, the mechanisms by which and the manner in which the Earth responds to forcing, and the local and regional consequences of global environmental change. They should also seek to improve our capabilities for both prognostic predictions and retrospective simulations of the evolution of the Earth system. NASA’s IDS investigations should be based on approaches that integrate more than one traditional Earth science discipline and encourage innovation and complementary use of models and data from multiple satellites or sensors. IDS investigations may make use of a combination of space-based remote sensing data, regional and/or global models, and where necessary, data from suborbital platforms to address the intended scientific questions” (source).