SEAL at CNR graduate research symposium

Last Wednesday, Feb 26th, SEAL Ph.D. students Nick, Ian, and Xiaojie participated in the 3rd annual CNR graduate research symposium. Both Ian and Xiaojie had their poster presentations about current research work. Nick joined the 3-minute thesis competition (3MT), for which he won the 1st place prize!

Nick’s 3MT was about his dissertation research. He is focusing on using remote sensing and geospatial analytics to understand the ecological processes and the impacts of forest disturbance, which is critical to long term changes of the carbon cycle in forested environments.

Ian’s poster presentation was about Ian and Xiaojie’s recent work of comparison between MODIS phenometrics and GPP measurements from flux towers. This work found evidence that MODIS-based phenology imagery (MCD12Q2) can reliably capture the interannual GPP variability for the whole world.

Xiaojie’s poster presentation was about understanding how phenology controls the productivity of managed forests in the southeast. This work combined field measurements of tree growth in experimentally manipulated loblolly pine stands with a recently-developed 30 m spatial resolution land surface phenology product (NASA PI: Friedl; data available soon).