My Present Research Activities:

1. Biocomplexity: Integrating models of natural and human dynamics in forest landscape across scales and cultures. This is an NSF funded project involving faculty and students of several departments on campus and from other universities. Miguel and four others are principal investigators. I serve as a senior staff, mainly providing support in the area of GIS, remote sensing, and spatial analysis.

2. Developing predictive landscape models of vegetation cover dynamics subject to human disturbances and assessing the impact of vegetation changes on hydrological and carbon dynamics in the Gran Sabana region in southeastern Venezuela. This is a grant proposal that has been submitted to the NASA’s LBA-ECO (Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazon) program. Both Miguel and I are the PIs. We expect the arrival of the feedback from the NASA program coordinators and proposal reviewers any moment.

3. Rapid identification of wetlands for protection from oil well drilling. This is a project funded by Devon Energy (the former Mitchell Energy) and finished this past summer. I am the PI and Bruce is the Co-PI. The results will be presented in the ASPRS 2003 Annual Conference in Anchorage, AK (The abstract has been submitted).

4. Using GIS to help assess the current UNT E-Trans routes and plan for the future. This project involves Bruce, Reshmi Mukherjee (a geography graduate student), myself, and the staff from the University Planning Office. The plan is to map the location of UNT students residing in Denton and to compare the distribution pattern to the current E-Trans routes. This project can become fairly complex when spatial, temporal, and students’ characteristics are all considered. Reshmi has decided to take this project as her thesis research. Bruce and I will be the PIs. We have had the first meeting with the staff of the University Planning Office on September 13, 2002 and received the address data from Allen Clark (University Planning) to do the first-round geocoding.