Thursday, August 24, 2017

Intro GIS workshops offered for SEAS first fall semester

The ESA Lab will offer free Introductory GIS workshops to members of the SEAS community this fall semester. To register, head to the ESA Lab website and click on the Workshops tab.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Introductory GIS workshops

The ESA Lab will offer free Introductory GIS workshops to members of the SNRE community this fall semester. To register, head to the ESA Lab website and click on the Workshops tab.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Dan Brown co-organized a workshop in June 2014, together with Richard Moss at PNNL, to help scope national level scenarios for land use in the US for the US Global Change Research Program. See details here.
ESA Lab, in collaboration with Arun Agrawal and IFRI, awarded $890k from NASA to study the land-cover and social impacts of land acquisitions Sub-Saharan Africa.

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Archived News


ESA Lab hosts workshop on Land Use and the Carbon Cycle (10/09)
ESA Lab Director Dan Brown and post-doctoral fellow Derek Robinson helped organize a workshop on the interactions between land-change process and the carbon cycle, under the auspices of the US Global Change Research Program and with funding form the USGS and USDA. The workshop broaght together about 60 leading scientists and science policy makers to discuss the role and content of integrated science on carbon processes and human management and policy activities on landscapes. You can learn more about the workshop at the website here and its outcomes and recommendations in the workshop report here.

ESA Lab Begins work on Land Use and Climate Variability on the Mongolian Plateau (7/09)
Researchers in the ESA Lab, in partnership with collaborators at Eastern Michigan University and the Chinese and Mongolian Academies of Sciences, have received a $900,000 grant from NASA to study human adaptation to climate change on the Mongolian Plateau. The project is part of an ongoing set of research activities in the lab on human-environment interactions in China and other parts of Asia, including Siberian Russia. Projects have examined the effects of the break-up of the Soviet Union on the forest dynamics in Siberia; how land-use changes in the Central Yangtze Basin contribute to changes in vulnerability to flooding. You can see the full press release here.

ESA Lab Contributes to US-German Conference on Land Use and Climate Change(10/08)
ESA Lab Director Dan Brown and PhD Student Derek Robinson helped organize a bi-national conference on Land Use and Climate Change.  The conference, sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the German equivalent (DFG), was held in Berlin Oct 2 and 3 and focused on the role of land use in the mitigation of and adaptation to climate changes.  The successful conference aimed to identify research that would further our understanding of how land constraints affect our ability to mitigate and adapt to climate change, develop international collaboration on these topics, and contribute to the development of the next generation of scientists focused on these topics.   Read more at the DFG press release here and the workshop report here.
 

ESA Lab Begins new NSF-funded Project (8/08)
This fall ESA Lab faculty and students begin working on a new project funded with a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation entitled "Spatial Land-Use Change and Ecological Effects (SLUCE): Interactions of Exurban Land Management and Carbon Dynamics." The project is a joint effort of faculty in SNRE (Brown, Nassauer, Currie), the Center for the Study of Complex Systems (Page, Riolo) and George Mason University (Parker) aimed at understanding the contribution of land-use changes in exurban areas to carbon dynamics. See the press release here.

PhD Alumnus Accepts Position with the Bureau of Land Management (8/08)
Jason Taylor , a PhD student in SNRE and in the ESA Lab whose dissertation examined the relationships between land use, land cover, and avian communities along an urban-rural gradient in Southeastern Michigan, has accepted a position of Natural Resource Specialist at the White River Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management in Meeker, CO. Jason will be combining his many skills in GIS and natural resources management to develop a large-scale plan for land management in the context of a significant oil and gas boom. We all wish Jason the best in his new position.


PhD Student Awarded Competitive Fellowship from NASA (5/08)
Qing Tian, a PhD student in SNRE and in the ESA Lab, was recently awarded an Earth System Science Graduate Student Fellowship from NASA.  According to NASA, "(t)he purpose of the Fellowship program is for the Office of Earth Science to train a pool of highly qualified scientists in support of NASA's central mission to understand and protect our home planet." Qing's proposal, titled "From Vulnerability to Sustainability: Vulnerability and Sustainable Development in the Context of Climatic and Institutional Changes in Rural China," was one of 50 selected out of an applicant pool of 200.  Congratulations Qing!

Derek Robinson and Qing Tian, PhD students in SNRE and in the ESA Lab, were awarded Graham Environmental Sustainability Fellowships from the Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute (GESI). Derek was a winner in the 2007 competition and Qing in the 2008 competition. These highly competitive fellowships recognize their high quality and integrative work on environmental research.

PhD Student Wins Second Place in AAG Student Honors Competition (4/08)
Derek Robinson, a PhD student in SNRE and in the ESA Lab, placed second in the student honors competition held by the GIS Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. Derek presented her paper, titled "Development of a GIS-based agent-based model as a platform to evaluate ecological land-use development policies," as part of a special session at the Annual Meeting of the AAG in Boston.  Congratulations Derek!

Former ESA Lab PhD student Tingting Zhao recently began a tenure-track position in the Department of Geography at Florida State University in Tallahasee beginning Fall 2007.  We wish Tingting the best in her professional career.

ESA Lab MS Alumnus wins PhD Fellowship (9/07)
Former ESA Lab MS student Neil Carter recently began the PhD program in Fisheries and Wildlife at Michigan State University beginning Fall 2007.  To support his work or tigers in Nepal, Neil was awarded a competitive distinguished university-wide PhD fellowship. Good luck, Neil!

PhD Student Awarded Competitive Fellowship from Canadian Science Agency (4/06)
Derek Robinson, a PhD student in SNRE and in the ESA Lab, was recently awarded a competitive post-graduate fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada.  The program from which he received the award was especially competitive because it allows him use the fellowship for study outside of Canada. The award supports Derek's dissertation research on the interactions between land-use and ecological processes (in particular, carbon uptake) at the urban-rural fringe.  He will couple an agent-based model of land-use change with an ecosystem process model.  Congratulations Derek!

PhD Student Wins Second Place in AAG Student Honors Competition (3/06)
Amy Powers, a PhD student in SNRE and in the ESA Lab, placed second in the student honors competition held by the GIS Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. Amy presented her paper, titled "Developing and Testing a Model to Propagate Error in Post-Classification Change-Detection," as part of a special session at the Annual Meeting of the AAG in Chicago.  Congratulations Amy!

ESALab Students Accept Tenure-Track Positions  (3/06)
Current ESA Lab PhD student Amy Powers recently accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which starts in Fall 2006.  Former ESA Lab PhD student Geoffrey Duh is currently in a tenure-track position at Portland State University.  Also, former ESA Lab post-doctoral fellows Elisabeth Addink and Li An are well established in tenure-track positions at the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands) and San Diego State University, respectively. We wish all ESA Lab alumni the best in their professional careers.

ESA Lab Research on Rural Sprawl Featured in Ecological Applications (12/05)
A December 2005 special feature of Ecological Applications, a publication of the Ecological Society of America, outlines the nationwide trends in rural land use in the US, focusing on the phenomenon of "rural sprawl," the ecological consequences of such trends, and several planning and policy options available to minimize the negative ecological effects.  The feature was co-edited by Andy Hansen (Montana State University) and ESA Lab's own Dan Brown.  Read the press release.


ESALab Co-Hosted Successful Geocomputation 2005 (8/05)
The ESA Lab was pleased to co-host, with the Institute for Geospatial Research and Education at Eastern Michigan University, the 8th International GeoComputation Conference from 1-3 August 2005 in Ann Arbor on the campus of the University of Michigan. The conference continued a successful series of meetings held in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States.

ESA Lab Research Featured in Recent SNRE Development Newsletter (5/05)
The ESA Lab's remote sensing research in Michigan and Siberia was recently featured in the SNRE Development Newsletter.
The full article can be found
here.


PhD Student Awarded Competitive Fellowship from NASA (8/03)
Amy Burnicki, a PhD student in SNRE and in the ESA Lab, was recently awarded an Earth System Science Graduate Student Fellowship from NASA.  According to NASA, "(t)he purpose of the Fellowship program is for the Office of Earth Science to train a pool of highly qualified scientists in support of NASA's central mission to understand and protect our home planet." Amy's proposal, titled "Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Error in Land Cover Change Analyses: Identifying and Propagating Uncertainty for Ecological Monitoring and Modeling," was one of 55 selected out of an applicant pool of 217.  The fellowship will fund Amy's dissertation work on error and uncertainty in remote sensing based analyses of land cover change. Congratulations Amy!

ESA Lab Contributes Research to USDA Forest Service Assessment (8/03)
Output from research at the ESA Lab was incorporated into an assessment of change in the North Central region of the United States that was conducted by the USDA Forest Service, North Central Research Station.  We developed a methodology to create information about land cover change from disparate sources of data, i.e., archived land cover maps and satellite imagery.  The change information was combined with data from other groups and is now available on the web. A research publication is forthcoming.

ESA Lab Research Cited in Report to Congress (4/03)
Research results from work done in the ESA Lab were cited in the Fiscal Year 2003 version of Our Changing Planet, a report on the US Global Change Research Program and the Climate Change Research Program that was submitted to the US Congress as a supplement to the President's Fiscal Year 2003 Budget.  The work is cited on pages 76-78.  The report refers to work that uses satellite imagery, aerial photography, and archival plat maps to examine the land use processes that have lead to increasing amounts of forest cover in the Upper Midwest over the last 30 years.  For more information on this work refer to this page.

ESA Lab Now Offers Hourly Service
Do you have GIS, GPS, or remote sensing related work that needs to be done but not the staff hours or skills to get it done? Do you need training or consultation in the use of GIS, GPS, or remote sensing? The ESALab currently offers an hourly service and support option to clients both within the University of Michigan and outside the university. For more information, please contact the ESA Lab Manager (Shannon Brines, email: sjbrines@umich.edu, phone: (734)763-3573).


The UofM Campus-wide SA/GIS Initiative
Spatial analysis and geographic information science (SA/GIS) at The University of Michigan is a collaborative effort between various schools, colleges, departments, and libraries. The goal of these activities is to integrate knowledge and facilities between units to aid in the dissemination and use of geographic information and analysis.
Would you like to learn more? Visit the UofM CSCAR (Center for Statistical Consultation and Research) SA/GIS site.