GIS and Remote Sensing | arcGIScience

GIS and Remote Sensing Analysis for Global Sustainability

Using GIS and Remote Sensing, I collected and analyzed demographic and environmental information for several projects located in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. As part of my postdoctoral appointment at Columbia University, I gathered data from multiple international sources and conflated them into functional geodatabases to create raster and vector data layers for further analysis. Some of these projects included: the Peruvian Amazon forest project (with Dr. Maria Uriarte) and the Amazon Global Forest Regrowth (with Dr. Ruth DeFries, shown below).

The scene example shown here overlaps the USGS WRS-II Path 02 / Row 15 frame, which is located in the western section of the Brazilian Amazon forest. Each window depicts the existing conditions from the mid 1980’s through 2011, after being reclassified from the original images captured by NASA’s Thematic Mapper (TM) satellite.

The reclassification shows the distribution of forest (Green), newly developed land (dark pink), existing developed land (Red), and the presence of clouds on some data frames (Blue). The entire raster classification was performed in ENVI and the results were quantified by transforming raster data to vector polygons according to land cover type using ESRI’s ArcGIS raster extensions. The final outputs were organized using pivot tables in Excel and presented for further discussion and analysis.