VIPER lab member Michael Toomey wins Digital Globe contest

Post date: Oct 08, 2010 10:42:4 PM

Graduate Student Michael Toomey was one of the winners of Digital Globe’s 8-band Challenge. Digital Globe, a commercial satellite products company and one of the main purveyors of Google Earth base imagery, launched the competition this summer to promote the diffusion and use of their newest 8-band (5 visible, 2 near infrared and 1 “red-edge” band) hyperspatial (0.5m multispectral/2.0m panchromatic) imaging platform, WorldView-2 – the only one of its kind (for more information). The reward was 100 km2 of imagery and and will be entered into a small pool to compete for financial support to attend the 2011 Geospatial World Forum in Hyderabad, India.

Michael’s proposal, “Enhanced detection of smallholder crops along the Amazonian frontier,” is an extension of his PhD research that he is conducting as a member of the Visualization and Image Processing for Environmental Research (VIPER) lab. This research is a continuation of long-term UCSB involvement in tracking land cover and land use change in southwestern Brazilian Amazonian state of Rondônia. This work began as a research objective of the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazônia (LBA), an international research collaboration in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s to conduct extensive studies of Amazonian ecology and its effect on regional and global climate. This work has continued to 2008-2011 as a smaller collaboration with a team of economists from Salisbury University and North Carolina State University. One of the project’s goals is to construct a 27-year annual land cover time series of the Rondônia state and introduce agricultural land cover classes to the imagery archive. To perform the latter task, Michael conducted field work in Brazil in July 2009 to collect ground reference data for annual and perennial crops. The work consisted of running around tropical rangelands with a machete and GPS, speaking bad Portuguese to puzzled farmers, and drinking several liters of Brahma each night to replace lost fluids. Michael will be using the new imagery to complement the Landsat-based imagery which forms the underpinning of the current methodology.

Regarding his research, Michael states: “I am fascinated by most aspects of environmental science - both the physical and human aspects. But that description is not entirely helpful. Specifically, I primarily use geographic tools, satellite remote sensing, and Geographic Information Systems to study terrestrial systems. Some recent, developing research will also incorporate micrometeorology data – records of customary weather variables (e.g., temperature, humidity, precipitation) as well as energy and gas exchanges between the land and atmosphere (e.g. CO2, latent heat).” For more about Michael’s research, teaching, and curriculum vitae, check out his web site here.

Here is a screen shot of the imagery that Michael received through the competition. The image shows a region just to the north of the municipal capital, Ouro Preto do Oeste, in Rondonia, Brazil. Here you can a large amount of cleared pasture and dirt roads, assembled in the normal grid-like fashion (pale purple); forest remnants (bright green) and coffee plantations (dark green regular rows).

You can consider this the 'street view' version of the WorldView2 image. Though not the exact same spot as the featured satellite image, it is very typical deforested Amazonia. In the front, two jugs await the milkman – this is the kind of milkman that picks up, however, instead of delivering.

Here we have emerged from a nasty overgrown thicket of sub-tropical grasses, riddled with burs. Removing said burs was actually the more frequent use of our machetes. From left are Dan, a collaborator from Salisbury University, Michael, and Carlos, our driver and guide.

One day we happened upon a school house at the 'end of the Earth,' as the school teacher described. It was a very remote area in northeastern Rondonia near the perimeter of a vast national park. The kids there had no idea what we doing there, of course, so we tried to show them some of our little mapping tricks.