News
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A new paper by Giroux et al., A high-frequency mobile phone data collection approach for research in social-environmental systems: Applications in climate variability and food security in sub-Saharan Africa, has just been published in Environmental Modeling & Software. The paper examines the potential for the collection of social-environmental data by farmers via short-message service (SMS), including the benefits in terms of timing and frequency of data collection, cost, and burden on respondents, as well as limitations with regards to data integration. The paper also presents the architecture for managing and processing heterogeneous data, tools to assess data quality, as well […]
My colleagues and I have a new paper (accessible here) out today in the latest issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the theme of which is “Tropical Grassy Biomes: linking ecology, human use, and conservation“, edited by Drs. Caroline Lehmann and Catherine Parr (a fellow Fitztitute alum). Our paper uses a new land use tradeoff model that is designed to find optimal tradeoffs between agricultural expansion and environmental conservation in Zambia, a bellwether for agriculturally driven land use change in sub-Saharan Africa’s savannas (see our earlier paper on this subject for more background). The model is designed to […]
Last week I was in Italy to help teach a new course on UAS for Environmental Monitoring, which was organized by Salvatore Manfreda and Kelly Caylor, and run under the aegis of the University of Basilicata. Xurxo Gago from the Universitat de les Illes Balears provided instruction on multicopters and estimating crop water use from thermal imagery. We held classes in the ancient city of Matera (a remarkable place), while flight training and data collection practicals took place in farmland to the south near Metaponto. By the end of the week, 17 students successfully ran a data collection mission (using […]