WyGISC News and Events:
Driese Appointed Emeritus Lecturer
The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees recently approved WyGISC Senior Lecturer and former Geospatial Information and Technology (GIST&T) Program Director Dr. Ken Driese as Emeritus Senior Lecturer.
The title of Emeritus Senior Lecturer is awarded to faculty members who retire after long and meritorious service to the University.
Driese joined WyGISC in 2001 as a remote sensing scientist, where he established a remote sensing lab and began teaching the core of the remote sensing curriculum at UW. Following subsequent appointments in the Botany Department and Life Sciences Program, Driese returned to WyGISC in 2019 to help design, launch, and direct the Center’s new interdisciplinary GIST Program before retiring earlier this year.
“This is a well-deserved appointment, recognizing Ken’s many contributions to WyGISC and the UW community,” notes WyGISC Director Jeff Hamerlinck.
Congratulations, Ken!
WyGISC faculty member and interim GIST director, Ramesh Sivanpillai, will be speaking in Cody, WY on Saturday, October, 2nd.
In the burgeoning manufacturing and economic hub of Coimbatore, development encroaches on wildlife corridors. Now elephants raid crop fields, resulting in infrastructure and economic losses,and in human and elephant deaths. From his work with stakeholders, Dr. Sivanpillai will discuss the measures available to protect investment and minimize casualties.
Hodza Promoted to Senior Research Scientist
Congratulations to WyGISC faculty member Dr. Paddington Hodza (PhD, West Virginia University, 2007) for his recent promotion to Senior Research Scientist. Dr. Hodza joined the University of Wyoming in 2013 as an Assistant Research Scientist and WyGISC Assistant Director. He was promoted to Associate Research Scientist and WyGISC Associate Director in 2016, a position he held until 2021. Dr. Hodza is a certified GIS Professional, licensed FAA Drone Pilot, past recipient of a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship and a Leadership Wyoming alumnus (Class of 2017). Dr. Hodza currently serves on the Board of Directors of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science. His current research interests include unmanned aerial systems, multimodal GIS education, positivity GIS, immersive geovisualization, and spatial data science. Once again, congratulations to Dr. Hodza on this significant achievement!
Shannon Albeke, WyGISC Senior Research Scientist, faculty member, and Co-author of "Body size and digestive system shape resource selection by ungulates: A cross-taxa test of the forage maturation hypothesis" is highlighted in the UW News article "UW-Led Research Finds Body Size, Digestive Systems Shape Ungulate Foraging"
Research led by a University of Wyoming graduate student involving about 50 scientists from across the globe has provided new insights into the behavior of ungulates (hoofed animals) as it relates to forage conditions and water availability.
WyGISC's Di Yang received NASA EPSCoR Grant: "NASA SMD Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office (CISTO): A Meta-Learning Framework for Characterizing and Accessing Training Data for GLOBE Observer Mosquito and Land Cover Protocols"
The goal of NASA EPSCoR is to provide seed funding that will enable jurisdictions to develop an academic research enterprise directed toward long-term, self-sustaining, nationally-competitive capabilities in aerospace and aerospace-related research.
Yang will be using the grant to host a series of activities (hackathons) across Wyoming to explore and develop deep learning tools to segment, characterize, classify, and label components of land cover photographs from the GLOBE Observer (GO) land cover and mosquito habitat app.
WyGISC faculty member Di Yang's recent research is highlighted in the recent AGU spotlight "Mass Bird Die-Off Linked to Wildfires and Toxic Gases"
Using observations from crowdsourced science and weather location data, researchers concluded that wildfires caused a mass die-off of birds in the western and central United States in 2020.
UW's Sivanpillai Selected as Fellow of National Remote Sensing Organization
December 2020 - Ramesh Sivanpillai, a remote-sensing scientist with the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center (WyGISC) at the University of Wyoming, has been named a fellow of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS).
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