Our research Detecting change in urban areas at continental scales with MODIS data is now available in the January 2015 issue of of Remote Sensing of Environment (click here for more information).
This work demonstrates a new methodology for monitoring urban land expansion at
continental to global scales using Moderate Resolution Imaging
Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. We tested the method in 15 countries in East-Southeast Asia experiencing
different rates and manifestations of urban expansion, finding accuracies ranging from 70-95% at the country level. A companion article describing the spatial and temporal trends in urban growth across the 15 countries, A new urban landscape in East-Southeast Asia, 2000-2010, has been accepted at Environmental Research Letters.
Caitlin Kontgis presented her work, Understanding transitions in rice paddy extent and management in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta using Landsat data,
at the 2014 AGU meeting in San Francisco, California. This work
demonstrates how to map rice agriculture using fine-scale Landsat data
by generating dense time stacks over multiple growing seasons. Second,
the new approach differentiates between single-, double-, and
triple-cropped rice paddies in the region, again by exploiting
temporally dense EVI trajectories. The results show that this new
approach can map rice paddy agriculture with over 90% accuracy at a much
finer spatial resolution than has ever been produced. In addition,
this research demonstrates that triple-cropped rice fields have nearly
doubled in area from 2000 to 2010, from one-third of total rice area to
nearly two-thirds of paddy area.
Caitlin will submit this work for publication in Remote Sensing of Environment.
Our new research assessing the urban transformation in Western China has been published in this month's issue of Landscape & Urban Planning. The work, funded by a NASA Land Cover-Land Use Change grant, focuses on the post-reform period (1988–2009) in four major metropolitan areas: Chengdu, Xi’an, Kunming, and Urumqi (shown below). The analysis exploits recent land change maps, satellite images, socioeconomic data, and master planning documents, and draws on a variety of spatial and statistical measures to estimate urban patterns through space and time. Check out the full article here for more information.
Caitlin Kontgis was
selected to receive the prestigious Twin Cities Women's Philanthropy
Council student travel grant. Caitlin is the very first recipient of
this grant, and was selected based on the high ratings from peer
reviewers she received on her Vilas Travel Award application. This
spring, Caitlin will use the grant to spend 10 weeks in Vietnam working
with collaborators at the Can Tho University Research Institute for
Climate Change. This grant will enable her to collect data necessary to
parameterize and validate an agricultural model that will help her
understand how future climate fluctuations could impact rice paddy
yields in the Mekong River Delta.
