Oct 15, 2018

Lianas—woody vines, including grapes—are structural parasites. Climbing on their hosts to get to the sunlight means lianas can spend less energy supporting themselves, devoting more to producing leaves and fruit. The risk is that their wood is less robust to stress, like freezing cold temperatures. As the water in the plant’s veins […]

Sep 18, 2018

In November, 2016, Haifa, Israel experienced a fire on the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI), causing damage to homes and other infrastructure in the urban forest landscape. The damage was visible in several Earth Observation datasets, including MODIS, Sentinel-2, and the Planet Dove constellation. Yaron Michael, in the Department of Geography and Environment at […]

Sep 13, 2018

Many communities live in mountainous or glaciated terrain, with a constant threat of landslides and avalanches. Remote sensing methods, including construction of digital elevation models (DEMs), have the potential to detect deformation of the Earth’s surface—not only horizontally, but also vertically. While active sensors like radar are excellent for detecting this 3D […]

Jun 19, 2018

Classic remote sensing for agricultural relies heavily on indices like NDVI (Normalized Differential Vegetation Index), which uses information from the red and near-infrared portions of the spectrum to provide an indicator of vegetation greenness and vitality. However, other indices, often implicating other parts of the spectrum, may provided added and actionable information […]

Jun 5, 2018

Straddling the South Dakota-Wyoming border, the Black Hills region is characterized by karst features—caves, sinkholes and other landforms created as water erodes dolomite and limestone deposits. Given the importance of water in creating karst formations, climate change has the potential to alter karst intensity. Barbara Theilen-Willige, Professor at Technical University Berlin, used […]