Zen and Biology

While doing some research on biodiversity patterns and ecoregions today, I came across two very interesting articles:

This first one is older than I am:

The ecologist as Zen master

The Conservation Biologist as Zen Student

I've been doing a lot of reading on atheism lately (namely Sam Harris' last two books) and it's nice to see science(ecology) and religion(zen, some forms of which I tolerate) be brought together in a coherent way in these two articles.

National Geographic Work

I will have a 3 page spread map of the Brazilian Amazon in the January issue of National Geographic Magazine. I worked closely with Bill McNulty (the magazine's Director of Maps) to put it together and we are both happy with the way it turned out. Nasa Blue Marble imagery and SRTM 30 data was used in combination with MODIS Land Cover data from Boston University and fire data from the MODIS Rapid Fire team. It's an honor to have work published in the magazine.

Move to PG

It's now official, at the end of December I will be moving to Prince George, Central British Columbia to work on Glacier Mapping full time and finish my masters degree there. Here is what I'll be working on:

Western Canadian Cryospheric Network

Here is a brief sumary of my research objectives:

Fuzzy Object Classification Towards Change Detection of Glacier Extent

We propose to use polygons of glacier extent derived from topographic maps as a starting point in a change detection analysis using Landsat and ASTER imagery to determine glacier extents. Fuzzy object metrics describing thresholds, gradients and transitions of texture, spectral characteristics, topology, and terrain morphology are considered in the change detection process. Additionally, current land cover will be mapped with a particular emphasis on identifying periglacial lakes, ablation, accumulation and debris covered areas. This approach is being tested at seven glacier sites in British Columbia and Alberta to determine an appropriate methodology for use in a larger, inter-provincial glacier inventory. Modern classification methods including neural networks, decision trees and classical methods such as maximum likelihood and isodata classifiers will also be tested with and without image segmentation, and with pre- and post-classification segmentation. These methods will be evaluated against expert derived glacier boundaries thus permitting a robust assessment.


Keywords: Change Detection, Glacier, Classification, Object-Oriented, Canada-Western

I also plan on focusing more effort on terrain depiction research using LIDAR and other remote sensing tools including object-oriented classifiers and texture filters. i'll also be continuin my work on continuous data and dasymetric mapping for landcover depiction at landscape scale.