A series of video lectures by Prof Iain Woodhouse on understanding and using SAR data.
I thought I’d put together some random notes while learning from the Synthetic Aperture Radar: Hazards course taught by Dr Franz Meyer, the Chief Scientist of the Alaska Satellite Facility and Professor of Radar Remote Sensing at the Geophysical Institute at University of Alaska Fairbanks, through edX’s massive open online course platform.
My main motivation for enrolling in the online course was to refresh my foundational knowledge and understanding of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR), and enhance my skills on utilising more advanced techniques including interferometric SAR (InSAR), polarimetric interferometric SAR (PolInSAR), and SAR tomography (TomoSAR)—all of which are quite very exciting technologies to employ in my research.
This month, we started a new research project that aims to track forest cover in certified community mangrove forests in Myanmar and provide information that may improve the process of certification and the policies supporting these forestland tenure activities. Specifically, the project aims to track mangrove forest change in 70 certified community forests of Myanmar, mainly in Ayeyarwady, Yangon, and Tanintharyi Regions. The research team will measure land cover change over time using annual Landsat time-series to quantify the amount of mangrove forest change since the late 1980s.
I have two new papers coming out soon. First, about the drivers and mechanisms of forest change in the Himalayas led by a friend and colleague, Akash Verma, to be published in Global Environmental Change; and second, about the conservation required beyond the existing protected area network to improve species and habitat representation in a global biodiversity hotspot led by yours truly to be published in Biological Conservation.
Watch this space!
I have been sharing the coding materials and resources related to my research on my GitHub page but I have not had the chance to blog about these here at all, even briefly. And so, let me make this short introduction on my activities on GitHub, which does seem to show (and share) more of my research activity than in this blog. It’s just been about time too that I updated the ‘mugshot’ on my GitHub page, which used to show an old (younger) photo of me, and now, more appropriately, shows a recent photo of me taken during the wedding of a dear colleague.
I am happy to announce our recently accepted paper for publication in Conservation Biology journal. The paper entitled, Untangling the proximate causes and underlying drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in Myanmar, is the product of our research lab, and a study led by Ms Cheng Ling Lim and Dr Graham Prescott under the supervision of Prof Edward Webb (our lab’s lead principal investigator) and Prof Alan Ziegler (our collaborator and lead principal investigator of the Wet Lab at the NUS Department of Geography) [1].
Here’s another suite of software tools that land change scientists and geospatial analysts should have in their toolbox: Open Foris.
Open Foris is a set of free and open-source software tools designed to facilitate flexible and efficient data collection, analysis, and reporting for environmental monitoring such as forest inventories, climate change reporting, socio-economic surveys, biodiversity assessments, land use/cover change assessments, among others [1]. This initiative, resulting from the collaborative efforts of numerous public and private institutions, is hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations.
A fantastic opportunity for land change science studies in the near immediate future is the growing utility of cloud computing geospatial analysis platforms such as Google Earth Engine. Combined with the ever-increasing availability of earth observation datasets, these kinds of technologies are expected to facilitate more regional- to global-scale analyses, as well as in-depth local-scale investigations, of land system changes.
Since the latter part of last year, I have been using Earth Engine first hand for my land change analyses.
Here’s a quick post just to mention a few updates. First, on publications, two articles in press in Conservation Biology journal, which were accepted over the past couple of months; and also two currently in review. Head over to the Publications page for more details. Most of my pre-occupation this year has been data analysis and modeling, and learning software tools such as Google Earth Engine and LaTeX. If you are interested to know more, please head over to my GitHub where you can check the data analysis and scripts, and read more about them.