In his time at UW, Guang Zheng was the first PhD student in SEFS Professor L. Monika Moskal’s Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analysis Laboratory. Last year, Zheng returned as a visiting professor from Nanjing University to work with Moskal on using a space-born lidar sensor, theGlobal Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), on the International Space Station to produce global maps of building heights.
The data, which maps building height at a 150-meter scale, is now available on Google Earth Engine. It has applications in urban studies across many fields, including climate, environmental, ecological, and social sciences, and provides new insights into urban developments, including socio-economic development, urban heat islands, climate mitigation, and carbon policies. With over half of the world’s population living in cities and about 75% of total carbon emissions annually originating from urban areas, high-resolution, global data on building height will aid in many research efforts aimed at understanding the consequences of built environments.
Aaron Johnston, who earned his Ph.D. from SEFS in spring 2013, was recently awarded a prestigious, two-year postdoctoral research position with the U.S Geological Survey’s Mendenhall Research Fellowship Program! Johnston studied competition between eastern and western gray squirrels in the Puget Sound lowlands for his dissertation (working with Professor Emeritus Steve West), and he will be moving to Bozeman, Mont., after the winter holidays to begin the fellowship.
Aaron Johnston’s fellowship will include two field seasons, and he’ll be expected to produce several publications from the research.
Selected through a competitive proposal process, Mendenhall Fellows help USGS staff conduct concentrated research around a number of important areas. Johnston’s proposal, “Extinction dynamics and microrefugia of the American pika,” will pair him with Dr. Erik Beever in Bozeman to explore the effects of climate change on pikas in the Cascades and Northern Rockies, though he hasn’t finalized his study area yet. He’ll have a research budget and be able to bring on a couple assistants to help with the project.
American pikas (Ochotona princeps) are a smaller relative of rabbits and hares. They’re an herbivorous alpine species that spread south with the last ice age, and now they’re holding on in high-altitude mountain areas in western North America. Their dependence on colder temperatures and preferred habitat—talus fields and rock piles at or above the tree line—has generally restricted their range to “sky islands” at the tops of mountains, where movement from one region to another can’t happen quickly, if at all. As a result, a warming climate threatens to shrink or eliminate the habitable range of pikas in the coming decades, and some estimates already suggest that 40 percent of American pikas in the Great Basin have disappeared in the last century, with the remaining populations retreating to even higher elevations.
With their habitat shrinking as the climate warms, American pikas are retreating to higher elevations on the “sky islands” of mountaintops.
Johnston says there are competing hypotheses about why this large-scale extinction is occurring. One widely supported theory revolves around the fact that pikas can’t survive prolonged exposure to high temperatures (more than a couple hours above 80 degrees, in fact, can kill them). Yet in a few regions, where temperatures far exceed that maximum—such as Craters of the Moon and Lava Beds national monuments—some pika populations have found a way to survive using microrefugia to escape the heat. Other hypotheses focus on phenology, and whether changing temperatures will reduce available vegetation for pikas, or if warmer winters will reduce available snowpack for insulation and expose pikas to extreme cold.
To address these questions and help design effective conservation strategies, Johnston’s project will involve modeling and mapping pika habitat topography using LiDAR. He’s been working in Professor Monika Moskal’s Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analysis Lab, and he sees powerful applications of LiDAR for wildlife management. “I think it’s a really exciting new technology that has enormous potential we’re just starting to realize,” says Johnston.
Project Summary The objectives of this study are to:
1. Develop broad-scale maps of talus at high-resolution through fusion of LiDAR and multispectral imagery;
2. Develop predictor variables for untested hypotheses about substrate, snowpack and phenology;
3. Evaluate regional variation in extinction mechanisms by incorporating new data on extirpations outside of the Great Basin; and
4. Evaluate differences in habitat and connectivity maps created by models with and without microclimate and microhabitat variables.
This project will use limited field work to characterize substrate at selected sites for development of talus maps, and supplement existing data on pika persistence at historical sites of occurrence. Results of this study will increase understanding of pika responses to climate change, inform conservation strategies, and provide map products widely applicable to many research areas, including wildlife ecology, plant ecology, geomorphology, hazard assessment and hydrology.
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Congratulations, Aaron, and good luck with this tremendous opportunity!
Riley Milinovich and Meghan Halabisky get ready to scan the husky statue.
A couple weeks ago, two students in her lab, Meghan Halabisky and Riley Milinovich, used terrestrial LiDAR to produce a three-dimensional visualization of the husky statue guarding the main entrance to Husky Stadium. This type of remote sensing involves scanning the object spatially, taking billions of laser readings to create a data cloud. Although Moskal’s lab generally uses terrestrial LiDAR in the forest, they took on this project to support a 3D technology demo on GIS Day.
Funded by the UW Student Technology Fee, the LiDAR equipment they used was the Leica Scan Station 2, and it took them about four hours from set up to shutdown to finish the job. Using that data, they successfully scanned and produced a visualization of the husky (check out the cool video clip below that Milinovich put together!). Now Washington Open Object Fabricators (or WOOF), a student group on campus, will use that data to produce a reduced-scale replica of the statue by 3D printer—which you can see at the demo this Wednesday!
LiDAR started off as a surveying tool used in projects such as looking at cracks in bridges, or topographic mapping and making very fine terrain models that can model environmental impacts like drainage and landslides. RSGAL, though, uses the technology for a range of forest studies, including leaf area index estimation, how many leaves per area of ground to get at evapotranspiration, net productivity, carbon sequestration and other ecosystem services.
The husky LiDAR visualization starts coming together.
Coordinated by UW Libraries, the GIS Day tradition at UW is entering its third year. The School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS) is one of the biggest GIS users and teachers on campus, says Moskal, and has been a partner in helping organize the event since its inception.
Other campus activities on Wednesday include a featured speaker, Dr. Sarah Elwood from the UW Department of Geography, as well as a series of “lightning” talks—including a five-minute segment with David Campbell talking about the UW Botanic Gardens interactive maps (in the Allen Library’s Research Commons). There will be a ‘Big Data’ discussion panel, and even a GIS Doctor’s Office from 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. that brings in some local GIS experts to help users answer questions.
SEFS Professor Monika Moskal just returned from a week-long trip to China, which included giving a keynote address—“LiDAR for the Measurement and Monitoring of Forest Ecosystem Services”—at the 2013 SilviLaser conference in Beijing, October 9-11 (the “13th International Conference on LiDAR Applications for Assessing Forest Ecosystems”).
Professor Moskal’s tour guides, Zhongya and Guang, taking her on a tour of Beijing.
During her trip, Professor Moskal had the opportunity to catch up with one of her former graduate students at SEFS, Guang Zheng, who is now an associate professor of remote sensing at Nanjing University. Guang’s Ph.D. work, which resulted in five peer-reviewed publications, was funded by Moskal’s grant through the National Science Foundation’s Center for Advanced Forestry Systems. Guang is continuing his work with terrestrial LiDAR, and one of his students presented a paper—with Moskal as a collaborator—about classifying point cloud data into ground, leaf and trunk points. This is a breakthrough in LiDAR analysis, says Moskal, as the method is not sensor dependent and can be applied to any 3-D point cloud data (including aerial LiDAR).
Another presenter at the conference was Zhongya Zhang, who was a visiting student in Moskal’s lab for two years. Zhongya presented their work in collaboration with another SEFS student, Alexandra Kazakova, on using hyperspectral imagery and LiDAR to classify forest tree species. This work was funded by McIntire-Stennis funds, as well as the Precision Forestry Cooperative.
Also, a day before the SilviLaser conference, Moskal was invited to address a group of students and faculty at the University of Geosciences in Beijing. She spoke about the hyper-resolution remote sensing research that is a big focus and specialty of her Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analysis Laboratory at SEFS.
Sunlight filtering through the trees and canyons on the way back to the crew’s BLM house on the Rogue River. “It was the perfect end to every day working underneath the Douglas-firs,” says Putz.
This past summer, a five-person crew from the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS) set out to conduct research along the Rogue River in Oregon. Working as part of Professor Monika Moskal’s Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analysis Laboratory, the students collected data of red tree vole habitat for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from May to September.
Their research proposed to answer several questions, including whether survey grade GPS can be used to accurately acquire individual tree location from LiDAR data (light detection and ranging), and whether ground-based inventory and leaf area measurements can be used to drive LiDAR-based empirical habitat models for the Rouge River site. The project will ultimately help the BLM develop a method of analyzing LiDAR data for forest inventory and management.
“Spending the summer in the Rogue River Valley working with amazing people and learning useful techniques taught me the importance of fieldwork, our forests and the animals that inhabit them,” says Tessa Putz, an undergraduate ESRM major with the SEFS crew.
“Working for BLM this summer was a great experience,” says PhD candidate Gonzalo Thienel, another member of the SEFS team. “I learned many things about nature, remote sensing and teamwork.”
