Growing up in suburban Adelaide, I never had any particular hobbies or interests, other than being generally hands-on. Going through high school, as with most people, I still had little idea of what direction I wanted to go – so I took the “I don’t know” option and applied for a BSc at Adelaide Uni.
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For the past six weeks, I have been somewhat distracted from my normal PhD research routine. My passion for rock and mineral mapping has been replaced by a strong interest in satellite bushfire scar mapping. My interest is personal, stemming from the fact that my family and I live on Kangaroo Island, and we have observed the devasting environmental, economic, and social effects that the bushfires have had on our local community. I am hoping that by posting my latest bushfire mapping efforts, this relatively new information may be of assistance to the island community…whether it be for land management, habitat assessment, fire prevention, or just so folks can have a better understanding of the distribution of burnt areas across the island.
I’m a final year PhD Candidate in Environmental Remote Sensing and Spatial Science at the University of Adelaide. Although I started my professional career as a GIS technician, for the better part of the past 20 years I have worked as an archaeological consultant, specializing in heritage surveys and rockshelter excavations in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. My PhD research aims to show to how aerial and satellite remote sensing technologies can help us better understand the ancient Aboriginal archaeological record of the Australian arid zone. It has been a lifelong passion of mine to marry my interests in Earth observation imagery with the archaeology—and I love it!
If you’d like to learn more about my academic work, you can check out my University of Adelaide researcher profile. However, I thought I’d spend this paragraph briefly describing ‘the real me.’ I grew up in central Texas, but I’ve been living and working in Australia more-or-less since the mid-199os. I’m a proud dad and I’ve been married to my fabulous wife Sarah for nearly 20 years. We live on Kangaroo Island, where we built a beautiful stone house from the rocks on our land. When I’m not working, I enjoy performing original music at markets and venues around the island. The recent Kangaroo Island bushfires have had a devastating effect on our community. In response, I have been using satellite imagery to map bushfire affected areas for the purpose of assisting recovery efforts. You can help Kangaroo Island with the recovery by supporting local producers and businesses by visiting the island for a holiday in the near future. There is still so much to see and enjoy in this beautiful place.
Starting with a bachelor’s degree in evolutionary biology I moved on to a rather unrelated though interesting Honours project. I designed and built a 3D printer that used urealytic bacteria to cement sand grains together creating 3D sandstone prints! While this was successful, my Honours taught me that working in a wet lab wasn’t for me. Deciding data science and working at a computer was more my speed I followed my botanical interests to the remote sensing group to commence a PhD.
We mentioned before that you may want to get comfortable in failing and feeling like a novice. The truth is, you will fail at least a few times in your life, especially if you plan to do a PhD. It’s all part of the learning experience. It’s not about the act of failing, though; it’s about what you do afterwards.
I recently came across the AρρEEARS platform when looking for a quick bulk-download of MODIS satellite imagery. AρρEEARS or Application for Extracting and Exploring Analysis Ready Samples is a web platform hosting a wide range of geospatial datasets (e.g. MODIS, Landsat, ASTER, etc.). To access the website, you just need your USGS login creadentials. A full list of the datasets available can be found here.
The first thing I liked about this platform is the fact that you can pre-process the data before placing the order (e.g. clip to a region of interest (ROI) with a custom shapefile, re-project, pre-select particular bands, etc.).
This year in late July/early August, some of our lab members – Ken, Andrew, Alicia and Hannah – took a trip to Yokohama, Japan to attend the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS). Here we share some of the highlights.
Feral cats can have a range of devastating impacts on natural ecosystems. But what exactly constitutes as a feral cat and why should it matter?
Brooke Deak’s work on feral cats identifies some interesting questions, explained in her review in Animals, “The Significance of Social Perceptions in Implementing Successful Feral Cat Management Strategies: A Global Review.”
Growing up on a dairy farm in the French countryside, I’ve always had an interest in sustainable land management and the environment surrounding me. After studying Biochemical Engineering (B.Sc) and Environmental Management (M.Sc) in France, I decided to move to Adelaide in 2012, for a couple of years, to gain professional experience in an English speaking country, and to discover new landscapes and a new culture. Seven years later I’m still here in Adelaide, but I gained so much professional experience over the years and learnt a lot about the Australian Environment.
A few nights ago while scrolling twitter I discovered an R package called ‘esquisse’. This package was designed to help users explore and extract data quickly and a brilliant feature of this package is the ‘ggplot2 builder’ add-in.
This add-in opens a GUI interface within RStudio that allows you to interactively explore and visualise your data using the ggplot2 package. Provide it with a data frame and you can effortlessly create bar graphs, scatter plots, histograms, boxplots and much more.