In September I spent two weeks in Bolivia, and had an opportunity to photograph jaguars and other large cats, many species of birds like Hyacinth macaws and the Great Potoo, and many other animals. Photograph of a Hyacinth macaw (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus) drinking from the pond on the farm where we were staying. This year has been the driest on record, with wild fires limiting access to the Pantanal in Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay. Global Wildfire Information System showing the state of the wildfires in the area observed from satellite in 2022. Check out their near real-time wildfire inform ..read more

As any "normal" scientist, part of my vacation was dedicated to learning something new. In this case I wanted to enhance my piloting skills by learning how to map with an entry level drone, the DJI Mini, using the software Dronelink (iOS). Technically, the DJI Mini is not a mapping drone as it lacks onboard waypoint capabilities, which are the foundation for the drone to follow a specific route. However, Dronelink has addressed this issue taking advantage of the open architecture of the Mini, and creates a virtual stick, where specific commands are sent to the drone in real-time, and simulate ..read more

This blog post serves as a companion to the publication "Mapping the Extent of Invasive Phragmites australis subsp. australis From Airborne Hyperspectral Imagery", and assumes a basic understanding of remote sensing principles by the reader. While this post is written in general language that may be more beneficial for people who are newer to remote sensing/vegetation related studies, it contains information that may still be useful for more experienced researchers. The list of considerations presented here is not exhausted, but still provides a good starting point for developing research pro ..read more

This post discusses the publication: "Multi-Scale Spectral Separability of Submerged Aquatic Vegetation Species in a Freshwater Ecosystem." Why study freshwaters? To date, aquatic remote sensing has largely focused on clear, shallow coastal waters where it’s relatively easy to see the bottom, but comparatively few researchers work where the water is harder to see through, like in lakes and rivers. So, I wanted to fill in some of the existing knowledge gaps in remote sensing of freshwaters to provide a foundation for future work. I decided to use a multi-scale approach to detect and identify s ..read more

Hyperspectral remote sensing presents the opportunity to collect narrow contiguous wavebands numbering over hundreds across the electromagnetic spectrum. These valuable information can be related to physical and chemical composition of the material in the image scene. Compared to multispectral imagery, hyperspectral remote sensing is rapidly emerging as a promising technology with the potential to improve classification performance of mangrove species. Nevertheless, the development of methods to harness the wealth of information available in the hyperspectral data for mangrove classification ..read more

Using our experience fixing four river networks in Peru for the Peruvian Amazon Rural Livelihoods and Poverty (PARLAP) project, we have developed three OpenSource QGIS 3 models that will permit you to find and fix problems in your directional linear network (road, rivers...). Figure 1. Overall structure of the models Model 1, “Check Geometries” will look for, and identify topology errors in the linear network files. These errors include errors like duplicate nodes, self overlapping and zero length lines (Figure 2). This first model also converts multipart geometries to single part geometries ..read more

In hyperspectral remote sensing, rich spectral information is acquired for each pixel of an image collected over a region of interest. This spectral information is extremely valuable as it can be used to identify and characterize the materials from each collected pixel. Before analyzing hyperspectral imaging data, it is important to geometrically correct the data. In the geometric correction, each pixel of the collected imagery is located in a real-world coordinate space. Due to factors such as lens distortion, sensor movement and rugged terrains, the pixels from raw hyperspectral imaging dat ..read more