It was a busy summer for the GEODE lab, with members traveling around the globe and advancing some exciting research. Here are some highlights:
Assistant Research Professor Patrick Jantz and Postdoc Ivan Gonzalez traveled to Kuching, Malaysia to host a workshop for their Connecting Landscapes (CoLa) decision support system tool. CoLa helps researchers, land managers, and decision makers model wildlife connectivity and is facilitating conservation led development around the world. Read more about CoLa here.
Assistant Research Professor Patrick Jantz participated in a Fulbright Specialist Visit to Unidad Central del Valle del Cauca in Tuluá, Colombia where he educated and collaborated with students and researchers on integrating AI into ecosystem management.
Assistant Research Professor Patrick Jantz is also seeking funding to integrate state-of-the-art snow modeling and AI-driven fence mapping to understand ungulate movement ecology and conservation in the American West, and to investigate drivers of carnivore-herbivore dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa using remote sensing and animal movement models.
During his trip to Borneo, Malaysia, Postdoc Ivan Gonzalez also visited iconic forest reserves of the Kinabatangan River and Danum Valley, in the northern state of Sabah (CoLa’s software sample dataset region). These areas maintain populations of elephants, orangutans, gibbons, langurs, proboscis monkeys, and hornbills. Also, the world’s smallest snake and squirrels. He is hard at work continually improving his CoLa wildlife connectivity tool and continues to be the lab’s largest supplier of amazing animal photos.
PhD student Victoria Hope traveled to Vienna, Austria to attend the European Geophysical Union annual meeting where she presented on her work comparing UNICOR and CoLa wildlife connectivity tools.
Victoria was one of the lab’s best traveled members this summer: she also taught at a field ecology course in Ogallala, Nebraska and participated in the NASA Biosphere meeting in College Park, Maryland. Besides traveling, Victoria is busy spinning up her PhD project on jaguar movement and connectivity.
Senior Research Scientist Katie Orndahl was invited to give a workshop on the Continuous Change Detection and Classification algorithm and its applications for vegetation mapping in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She had a fun and productive week meeting and working with the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment (NGEE) – Arctic team as part of a broader team writing retreat.
Katie is continuing to use her newly created Pan Arctic biomass maps and other Arctic vegetation maps to understand post-fire vegetation trajectories, permafrost thaw slump recovery, and caribou herbivory.
Postdoc Matteo Redana is hard at work improving biodiversity intactness mapping across Africa and South America, and has been leveraging some sophisticated modeling techniques to create a new dataset of landscape physiography across the Amazon Basin.
Research Associate Jeremy Forsythe traversed the continent several times this summer from the lower 48 to Alaska, and back. He also officially wrapped up his PhD! You can read his thesis on how light diffusion impacts southern pine ecosystem function here.