The Virginia Tech Office for GIS and Remote Sensing Research 2024 Symposium

Dr. George Allen, Assistant Professor of Hydrology and Remote Sensing; Virginia Tech Department of Geosciences.

Dr. Mike Willis, Associate Professor of Cryospheric Science, Geodesy and Remote Sensing; Virginia Tech Department of Geosciences.

Presentation Title: Beyond the gauge: Observing Earth's rivers and lakes from space

Dr. George Allen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech. He received a BS in Geology from UC Davis in 2008, an MS and a PhD in Geological Sciences from UNC Chapel Hill in 2012 and 2017, respectively. He completed a postdoc at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory before joining the faculty at Texas A&M in the Department of Geography in 2018. In 2022 he joined the faculty of Virginia Tech. George's research interests focus on global-scale evaluations of Earth’s changing inland surface waters, particularly river and lake systems. He uses satellite remote sensing, GIS, models and fieldwork to understand how Earth's freshwater resources are changing. He has published 53 peer-review journal articles, including publications in Nature, Nature Geoscience, Nature Communications, Science and PNAS. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2022, a NASA Early Career Investigator Award in 2024, and a Universities Council on Water Resources Early Career Award for Applied Research in 2024. 

Presentation Title: Navigating the New Arctic: The Greenland Hazard Project 

Dr. Mike Willis is an Associate Professor of Cryospheric Science, Geodesy & Remote Sensing in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech. His research blends geodetic and remote sensing tools with big-data and in situ measurements to answer questions about sea level change, natural hazards, landscape change, and the cryosphere. He is interested in the evolution of megacities, landslides, tsunamis, and coastal hazards, how problems scale both spatially and temporally, and how computer vision and machine learning algorithms can be applied to geophysical problems. He remains deeply committed to diversifying the geosciences. On a side note, Dr. Willis has been to Antarctica 12 times and is still deeply fascinated by polar regions.

Kinsey Browning, Geospatial Technical Area Lead; Stantec

Seth Peery, Senior GIS Architect; Virginia Tech Enterprise GIS Department

Presentation Title: GIS in Mining: Digging into Data

Kinsey Browning is a GISP, Certified ESRI Desktop Professional who is fluent in Spanish. She is a subject matter expert in the ESRI platform, a geospatial Technical Area Lead and specializes in guiding clients to the most efficient GIS solutions for their needs by configuring the suite of ESRI software products. Her work includes the development of databases and workflows for field and office data capture and management, including automated and semi-automated workflow solutions using ArcGIS Online and Enterprise tools such as Dashboards, Storymaps, Survey123, as well as customized solutions. Kinsey is currently serving as the Data Management Lead on the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) MS4 contract (providing direction and management of BMP Maintenance, AdoptaHighway application, and MS4 Portal, as well as coordinating multiple VDOT divisions to manage MS4 data). Kinsey is also a Certified ScrumMaster.

Presentation Title: A review of current geospatial support services provided by Virginia Tech Enterprise GIS

Seth Peery is Senior GIS Architect in the Enterprise Systems unit of the Virginia Tech Division of Information Technology.

Seth manages the technology stack supporting the scalable storage, sharing, and dissemination of GIS data, maps and apps - so that you don't have to. The value proposition of his small but dedicated unit is to lower barriers to the use of GIS at an institutional scale, make faculty more competitive in their research, embrace geospatial methodologies in teaching and learning across the disciplines, further the outreach missions of the university, and improve its internal operations. His team supports GIS server infrastructure, integration between GIS and other enterprise information systems, application development and advanced spatial analysis. From ArcIMS to ArcGIS Online, from the datacenter to the cloud, he has evolved the campus's GIS infrastructure in concert with the waves of innovation in computing over time that are then applied towards geospatial problems. He represents the university through the ESRI Innovation Program, and works to keep Virginia Tech at the forefront of the geospatial state of the art within our peer institutions.

Title: Participatory Health Mapping

—Meghann Albritton

Title: The Applications of Remote Sensing in Ecosystem Engineering Studies: A Scoping Review

—Cole Bristow

Title: Tracking Ghost Forest Progression along the Eastern Seaboard

—Daniel Donahoe

Title: Corn grain yield mapping using aerial-spectral imagery and machine learning techniques

—Sathish Raymond Emmanuel Sahayaraj

Title: Tree Canopy Cover Response to Land Development Policies in Fairfax County, Virginia

—Meghan Failor

Title: Relationships between Carbon Storage and Water Yield Across Virginia's Private Forests

—Lindsey Finks

Title: Space becoming Place: Using Lidar to Examine Human Occupancy and Collisions within a Shared Indoor Environment

—Addison Flack

Title: Effects of VADOF Cost Share Program on Hardwood Competition

—Caleb Harmon

Title: Soybean Yield Estimation Using SUAS Aerial Multispectral Imagery and Machine Learning Techniques

—Pius Jjagwe

Title: Music Accessibility: An investigation of spatial accessibility to 48 classical music pieces that are Americans' favorite

—Will Jones

Title: Understanding Indoor Spaces: Integrating Lidar, Deep Learning, and Computer Vision for Dynamic Space Analysis

—Shashank Karki

Title: Drought-induced Lake and Groundwater Storage Decline surrounding Lake Mead from InSAR Observations and Geomechanical Modeling

—Mohammad Khorrami

Title: Light Availability Estimates for River Surfaces in the Contiguous United States

—Yohtaro Kobayashi

Title: Using DEM Differencing to Detect Slope and Elevation Changes for Aappilattoq, Greenland

—Jarely Mendez

Title: Assessment and design guidance on limiting sedimentation in and around engineered rock nests for Eastern hellbenders (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis)

—Isabella Munson

Title: Relationship Between Fecal Indicator Bacteria and Salinity in Freshwater Across the United States

—Umme Fatema Piu

Title: Tracking Fine-Grained Forest Loss with ICESat-2 Photon Counting LiDAR

—Will Poncy

Title: Habitat suitability of photosynthetic biocrust in a cold desert ecosystem

—Sarah Power

Title: What grows on mines? Remote sensing classification of Appalachian mine lands

—Daniel Putnam

Title: A methodological investigation of OpenStreetMap’s (OSM) geospatial data quality in the context of 15-minute city research

—Fabiha Rahman

Title: Exploring ChatGPT’s capacity in spatial querying: An empirical study of 3,108 U.S. counties.

—Andrea Renshaw

Title: Tree crown segmentation using high resolution imagery and deep learning in Virginia's pine plantations

—Alison Ritz

Title: Using water quality as a proxy to estimate microplastic concentrations via Sentinel-2 in the New River, VA

—Luisana Rodriguez Sequeira

Title: Building damage risk for Indian megacities

—Nitheshnirmal Sadhasivam

Title: Using ICESat-2 ATL08 heights and Landsat time series products to assess the age-height relationship of southern yellow pines in the southeastern region

—Sonia Sharma Banjade

Title: Dissecting Social Equity in Dental Health Accessibility: A Geospatial Analysis in Virginia

—Zachary Sherman

Title: A framework for using SWOT data to observe flow waves and hysteresis along large rivers

—Hana Thurman

Title: Multi-Depth Soil Moisture Estimation Using Ground Peneterating Radar and Deep Learning

—Milad Vahidi

Title: Leveraging UAV Remote Sensing to Enhance Phenotyping of Peanut Physiology for Heat and Drought Tolerance

—Ranadheer Reddy Vennam

Title: Remotely sensed forest functional traits as predictors for gross primary productivity.

—Paige T. Williams, 

Title: Intersection of Social Justice and Environmental Change: Analyzing the Impact of Impervious Surfaces, Inundation and Land Subsidence on Disadvantaged Communities in the Chesapeake Bay Region.

—Clay Wise

Title: Drought Impacts on Farmland: Agricultural Loss from 2000 to 2021 in the United States

—Lauren Young