Congratulations to Katherine Mertes for receiving the 2012 Nasa Earth and Space Science Fellowship (NESSF)!
Katherine says: “I use movement data to empirically measure the spatial grains at which select East African bird species respond to particular environmental conditions. Once these “characteristic grains” are identified, the unique capability of NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS), which includes Landsat, ASTER, and MODIS remote sensing platforms, enables me to independently measure environmental conditions at study sites in East Africa at many spatial resolutions. I combine raw, transformed, resampled, and classified spectral and topographic data into a library of environmental variables likely to influence species occurrence along a continuum of spatial grains. Environmental data at locations where a species has been consistently detected or nondetected are then used as inputs to multivariate hierarchical models to determine the conditions that most strongly influence occurrence at different characteristic grains. This research will increase our understanding of the processes shaping species’ geographic distributions, and improve the predictive accuracy of species distribution models over local and regional spatial extents.”
More information on the award can be found here. (broken link)
Congrats, Katherine!