Where

This summer, I’ll be working as an AASPIRE intern for Madison Area Transportation Planning Board under Planning Division in City of Madison.

Continue reading CLOSER — Creating networks for roads accessibility within dane county →

For my placement, I will be working with the Azuero Earth Project (AEP), an organization located on Panama’s Azuero Peninsula that focuses on reforestation, habitat restoration, sustainable land use and environmental education.

Reforestation projects in the Azuero region of Panama often face multiple threats such as fire use due to cultural reasons and harvesting.  Having an idea of what geographic areas and time periods are most vulnerable to fire can be beneficial to protecting AEP’s reforestation efforts.

Global Forest Watch have produced tools to monitor fire-related threats on a global level.  AEP activated Global Forest Watch fire and harvest alerts over the dry season in 2018 and registered fire and harvesting threats on the peninsula.  The GFW data is a global dataset, so the extent to which they work in registering forest threats at the local level still need to be investigated.  I will be working on fire detection during the 2018 dry season using high resolution images limited to the Azuero region, then I will create maps of actual fire and harvest distributions.

Some secondary projects I will be working on involve my design and spatial analysis skills. I will redesign the Azuero map using my cartography knowledge and design skills, design infographics for AEP, and create a Collector App by using ArcGIS to allow researchers to collect plant information in the field in an accessible way.

I look forward to heading to Pedasi soon to work with a motivated, international group of people doing important work, and to use my remote sensing knowledge and skills in a practical setting.

It’s actually been just about one month that I’ve been out here on Long Island and additional two since starting work. I’m here at The Nature Conservancy’s chapter in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, a town that lives up to the idyllic setting conjured up in my mind by its name. Even doing my research beforehand, I was still surprised by how quiet and serene it is out here just up the hill from the shore along the Long Island Sound. The office I work at is actually a repurposed barn on a parcel of land also used as a research farm, and is therefore among the more classically-Midwestern-feeling places I’ve had the pleasure to spend any amount of time despite it being about an hour train ride from New York City.

Company

The company for which I work is Syncarto, LLC in Madison, WI. Syncarto ( https://syncarto.com/ ) is a cloud native collaborative mapping platform. I will contribute to the prototype of urban change detection in support of the Syncarto web application.