Activities
Everyone loves research and outreach activites!! To maintain more frequent updating, I am happy to announce that I will be using Twitter for future communications.
Very honored to be awarded with the Toulouse Scholar Award and the Office of Research and Innovation's Early Career Research Award!
Geography undergraduate student Ronney Phillips wins 1st place in the UNT GIS Day student project competition. Check out his storymap!
City of Lewisville Movement on the Parkway Event. Sep 18, 2021
PMAPS for Texas - First Teacher Workshop! Jul 8, 2021
This morning, we hosted the first workshop for the PMAPS project. National Geographic funded this project to provide geoinquiry trainings to K-12 teachers and pre-service teachers. We have more than 20 participants from all over Texas.
Four more sensors are installed at the traffic intersects of Triangle Community, Lewisville, Texas! Jun 1, 2021
Setting an air quality sensor on a traffic box in the Triangle Community, Lewisville, Texas
Thanks to our project partner: City of Lewsville!
Spring 2021 Lab Meetings
1/20 Rajshree Rege Literature Review of Sand Dune Research
Abstract: Rajshree will be presenting articles pertinent to her research on sand dunes and major milestones as reported in various research papers.
2/3 Laura Davila Castro Electric Vehicle Registration at Multi-Unit Dwellings in the City of Dallas
Abstract: This project focuses on understanding the relationship between 3 different variables. Electric vehicle registrations in the City of Dallas, low income and income/minority areas, and EV charger distribution within the city.
2/24 Kenny Hudman Ecological Responses to Severe Flooding in Coastal Ecosystems: Determining the Vegetation Response to Hurricane Harvey
Abstract: Kenny will present an overview of the unique aspects of Hurricane Harvey and how a storm of that scale might affect an upper coast salt marsh. He will explore some of the different factors that are present in salt marshes that could affect the level of disturbance felt by Hurricane Harvey. Lastly, the presentation will introduce some of the models that Kenny is considering for use in this sort of study and how he might interpret the data that he has received.
3/3 Sean Hickey A New Approach to Calibrating Low-Cost Air Quality Sensors
Abstract: During the summer of 2020, the Saharan Air Layer brought dust from Africa across the Atlantic and into Texas periodically for weeks. During this time, twenty low-cost air quality sensors were co-located with a federal regulatory air quality monitor in Denton, Texas. Sean will present an overview of two main strategies taken to calibrate these sensors and discuss how this event impacted the calibration process.
3/17 John South Machine Learning with ArcGIS Pro: A First Look
Abstract: The presentation will look at ArcGIS as a tool for spatial machine learning. We’ll take a look at the tools available in ArcGIS Pro 2.7.2, compare those to the tools available in ArcMap 10.8.1. If time permits, we’ll do a demo on multivariate prediction of potential global areas for seagrass growth.
4/28 Kerra Unal Spatial-Temporal Assessment of Irrigation Practice Changes and Its Impacts on Water Management
Abstract: Approximately 80% of the world's population faces high levels of water insecurity. Agricultural irrigation is one of the main factors affecting water resources. Therefore, the changes and effects of spatial-temporal assessment of irrigation practice on water management will be discussed.
National Geographic Award was made to the headline of UNT Today!
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC AWARD
Research scientist Kelly Albus will lead an interdisciplinary team from UNT’s Advanced Environmental Research Institute in a project that will invite middle school students and teachers to map air quality in their own communities. Albus and faculty researchers Lu Liang in geography and Sara Champlin in journalism hope to engage new and more diverse groups in environmental health education as they work with educators to put air quality sensors in place, measure and analyze data, and create maps of their findings. Classrooms will be able to monitor their air in real time and contribute to critical human health research. The work is supported through the Texas Geography Education Fund with funding from National Geographic.
Kerra received Geospatial Technology Scholarship
Master student Kerra Unal received UNT Geography Geospatial Technology Scholarship. Congrats!
Air Sensor - Snoopy at Koan School
We are so exciting to be partnered with Koan School on our geospatial air quality project. We have put one sensor at the school's playground and will gradually install sensor at our 3rd graders' home (3 are alive now!).
Sean Hickey Takes 3rd Place at Texas Energy Summit
UNT Geography Master's student Sean Hickey won the third place in the Malcolm Verdict Memorial Poster Contest of 2020 Texas Energy Summit. The summit explores the intersection of energy systems, emissions reductions, and economic development. The Summit creates space to collaboratively develop policy solutions that lead to cleaner air and a stronger economy for Texas.
Sean presented "Developing a community air monitoring network from machine-learning optimized low-cost sensors" as part of his master thesis. Sean's thesis is focused on using machine learning to calibrate the air pollution concentration measured by the low-cost sensors, which are deployed in a citizen science air quality monitoring project led by Dr. Lu Liang. The calibrated readings will be used to inform the detailed spatial-temporal patterns of air pollution in Denton at the block-scale. Details about the project can be found here. News.
Fall 2020 Group Meeting
Sep 10 Sean Hickey
Exploring the Effect of Highly-Localized Meteorology on Nightly Smoke Levels at a Campground in Mount Rainier National Park
Sep 24 John South
Photogrammetry of an Eighteenth Century Dinétah Archaeological Site using Post-Processed Kinematic Differential GPS Data Collected on an sUAS Platform
Oct 8 Rajshree Rege
Sand Dune Research: An Introduction
Oct 22 Kerra Unal
Object-Based Image for Lan Use and Land Cover Detection, by using Landsat 8 Image in Lonoke County in 2015
Nov 5 Daniel Michel
Vegetation and Building Mapping with Lidar for Local Climate Zone Classification
Busy summer! (Aug 19, 2020)
Hi all, it has been weeks since I updated our activities. This summer is super busy and we made tons of progress. The green stars are the sensors that we have successfully installed in participants' residence, schools, and institutes. More soon!
Sensor at Sewlyn School! (Jun 5, 2020)
Thank You Sewlyn School for supporting our project. Now we have the first sensor in school!
First sensor! (Jun 1, 2020)
Today, we have our first PM2.5 sensor deployed in the wild at UNT water research center! It is part of the UNT Air Quality Citizen Science project. Thanks to Dr. David Hoeinghaus for sharing your site and helping me hanging the device. Obviously, I am not tall enough to do the hanging job
EDD: Presents! 2020 (May 22, 2020)
Super proud to serve as a judge for EDD: Presents! 2020 hosted by Northwest ISD. Although it is virtual, the quality of the presentations are impressive! I am also glad to see two of the top three presentations are aimed at protecting our environment. One is about water-saving, and the other one is breathing cleaner air! Those high school students really rock!
Air Quality Citizen Science Recruitment (May 15, 2020)
Hey, here is the official announcement for recruiting citizens and institutional units to participate in our air quality research. Details can be found here: https://sites.google.com/site/liang3mlab/project-updates/citizen-science-air-quality?authuser=0
Update (May 22, 2020)
We have achieved Well! Thank you, Denton Citizens! After one week, we have 50 citizen registered our survey, 3 schools, and two research institutes agree to participate. One school district is on the way! Can not be more grateful for your support!
May 1, 2020
Our department, Geography and the Environment, recently hosted a COVID-19-related panel, with a human geographer, a geospatial scientist, a computer scientist and two medical geographers as speakers. I am proud to be invited as one panelist to talk about how COVID-19 influence air quality. Check the video out!
It is in the field! (Apr 13, 2020)
Finally, we co-located our low-cost sensor calibration system with TCEQ air monitoring station. Can not express how exciting we are. With few months, we will have our calibration data to work with!
Setting up sensor calibration system (Mar 2, 2020)
We are setting up our low-cost sensor calibration system, which is powered by the solar power and outdoor battery. So far, it works like a charm.
Women in STEM! (Feb 26, 2020)
Dr. Alexandra Ponette-González and I were invited to "Women in STEM" event that is hosted by STEM Academy for Northwest ISD. We gave a presentation "From Space to Ground, From Dust to Dirt: Using Geography to Solve Environmental Problems". Those female students are amazing and we had some wonderful conversations with them.
Guest lecture by Dr. Zhan Li on Sentinel imagery (Feb 18, 2020)
Digital Image Class welcomed a special online guest lecture presented by Dr. Zhan Li, a remote sensing specialist from German Research Center for Geosciences. The lecture covered the history, specifications, and the data hub platform of the European Space Agency's latest Sentinel data.
Sean received NPS Summer Internship! (Feb 4, 2020)
Sean got an Air Quality Assistant position at Mount Rainier National Park. He will support air quality data collection in the park, perform an analysis on PM2.5 observations to better understand how emissions from campfires affect air quality, and develop educational resources related to air quality issues for park staff to share with the general public. Congratulations!! UNT New is here.
Ronan presented her research in Perot Museum (Jan 30, 2020)
Ronan presented her air quality research in "Science in the News" hosted in Perot Museum of Nature and Science. Well done!
LLELA talk in Digital Image Analysis class (Jan 29, 2020)
Dr. Kenneth Steigman, who is the director of Lewisville Lake Environmental Learning Area (LLELA) gave a presentation on LLELA in my Geog 4570 Digital Image Analysis. This semester, we will use LLELA as our field site to conduct some remote sensing activities, e.g., landscape change detection, land use classification. Thanks Ken for making it happen!
NCTCOG Regional GIS Meeting (Dec 10, 2019)
Lu presented STAMP in NCTCOG regional GIS meeting for the first time. Meet with many regional GIS professionals.
BTW, Lu received UNT Scholarly and Creativity Award! Another celebration today!
GIS Day @ UNT! (Nov 13, 2019)
The GIS Day is a great success. Looking forward to future events. Ronan did her first poster and it is super!
Lu, Ronan, Sean are attending 2019 Texas GIS Forum at Austin, TX. (Oct 23, 2019)
Lu gave a presentation titled "Monitoring spatial-temporal patterns of PM2.5 for improved understanding of air pollution dynamics using portable sensing technologies".
Lu is teaching Geospatial Science to 6th-grader in Future Eagles Program
Oct 16, 2019
Future Eagles program is a collaboration between UNT and Denton Independent School District. It is aimed at educating 6th-grader by giving them mock lectures from UNT professors and immersing them with a brief college experience.