Ready, Set, Go!

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Global EVI Summer 2000. Image credit: NASA MODIS Gallery

We are technically about to start week 4 of the summer around here (!), but I feel like I am still trying to get in gear. The REU students have arrived and I think we have another excellent group. We assign our student-mentor teams into research clusters. Sometimes these clusters work collaboratively and other times we are grouped by a common interest. I am part of the “Landscape and Ecosystem Ecology” cluster with four other faculty and three other students (in addition to mine). We meet in our clusters about once a week during the summer and discuss research articles and what progress we are making on our projects. My student will be working on part of my USDA grant to map Amur honeysuckle. She will do some field work, but will spend a lot of her time learning about and using remote sensing and image processing. For students who do not have a strong background in remote sensing, I usually start out by having them go through the labs from my remote sensing class to get up to speed. We will use this week to get going on that.

I am still debating about exactly what to have her work on this summer. I have been considering using MODIS data to monitor vegetation phenology in our area from year to year. This would be useful for determining when the honeysuckle comes into leaf. This invasive shrub expands earlier in spring and retains leaves later in the fall than native trees and shrubs, so we are using satellite imagery from those two time frames to map abundance. It has been challenging to determine the optimum window each year, however, so I have been wondering if MODIS might help. There is still more work to do with Landsat images (what we have mostly used so far), so I have to decide which direction to go. I also wanted to give her some latitude in deciding how much to focus on field work and how much time to spend in the computer lab, so we’ll see! The REU students are only here for 10 weeks, so it is critical to keep these projects a manageable size and scope. This week will be a chance to lay out a feasible research plan. It should be fun!

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