GISDE Student-Faculty Research

The Geographic Information Science for Development and Environment master's degree program is designed for students to benefit by collaborating with their professors' research projects. This assures that students' research projects are consistently at the cutting edge of the most important issues in GIS. This section highlights the GIS faculty members and their on-going research projects.

Robert Gilmore Pontius, coordinator of the GISDE program, maintains an active research agenda in which students take a leading role. Pontius has eight major areas of applications: Land-Use Change, Quantitative Methods, Watershed Management, Public Participation, Brownfields Redevelopment, Human/Environment Interactions, Biodiversity Conservation, and Climate Change.

Yelena Ogneva-Himmelberger is collaborating on the National Children's Study. The National Children’s Study will examine the effects of environmental influences on the health and development of more than 100,000 children across the United States, following them from before birth until age 21. The goal of the study is to improve the health and well-being of children. Ann Raj (GISDE/MA ‘08) is a research assistant working with Ogneva-Himmelberger on the GIS component of the study.

Ogneva-Himmelberg is also working with Fallon Clinic and the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, on another NIH-funded project called “Proximity to Traffic, Air Toxic Exposures and the Development of Asthma in Children.” In this study she uses GIS tools to estimate the exposure to traffic-related pollution in children diagnosed with asthma.

Ron Eastman, director of Clark Labs for Cartographic Technology, is involved in a variety of research activities, with significant participation from students within the IDCE and Geography departments. Eastman is the author of IDRISI, one of the world's most widely distributed raster GIS and image processing software packages. Development of the IDRISI system is ongoing and provides many opportunities for students to become involved in algorithm development, programming and technical support.

Research groups within Clark Labs often develop around application or methodological problems and grow organically. Some research topics Professor Ron Eastman is working on include: Decision Support Systems, Land Use/Land Cover Change Modeling, Classifiers for Image Processing, Uncertainty Management in Image Classification, Uncertainty Management in GIS, Technology Transfer for International Development, Dynamic Modeling, Agent-based Modeling Neural Networks, Ecology, and GIS.

Sam Ratick has been the principal investigator on grants and contracts from the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Energy, and the Army Corps of Engineers. His interests include environment and public policy, energy and environmental systems, location analysis and modeling, quantitative methods.

Professor Ratick's current research includes:

1. Developing PC based decision support tools for planning eco-industrial parks, and for assisting in community-based, environmental decision making.
2. Defining, assessing, measuring, and mapping the factors that affect the vulnerability of coastal communities to severe storms.
3. Continued work on risk and uncertainty analysis and on location/allocation models and methods.

John Rogan is affiliated with Clark University's Human-Environment Regional Observatory-Central Massachusetts (HERO-CM) research program, which provides opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to analyze the causes and consequences of global environmental changes at local scales in faculty-led research projects. Rogan is leading the Massachusetts Forest Monitoring Program (MAFoMP) component of the research. This program leverages links with students, researchers, advocates, and policy-makers in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Arizona. HERO-CM has three main areas of research: large-area forest change monitoring, vulnerability analysis, and prediction of land-use and land-cover change.

Rogan is currently working on two funded research projects –– monitoring landscape changes in southeastern Arizona in relation to fire frequency and climate (U.S. Forest Service), and mapping emerald ash borer effects using hyperspectral imagery in the greater Detroit region (Clark Labs). Professor Rogan is a geographer specializing in landscape ecology, fire ecology and GIScience. Recent research projects have involved monitoring land cover change in California using remote sensing data, and mapping wildfire burn severity in south California.

< back to top