Teaching the Experts a Thing or Two

Chris receives award of recognition from President Bassett

Chris Lippitt (class of 2005) is now teaching experts on deforestation how to determine the veracity of their projections regarding how much and where forest loss will take place. He converts satellite-based information from several points in time into digital maps, and then employs novel statistical methods to determine if the outcomes projected are a product of real landscape change or map error. His work in concert with Clark faculty is pathbreaking, establishing a new standard of measures and metrics fundamental to the emerging interdisciplinary field of land-change science.

Chris hails from Souhegan High School in Amherst, NH. Attracted to human-environment and GIS studies at Clark, he was twice selected as a HERO Fellow, and has received the O'Connor Award for Excellence in Environmental Studies and a Condakes Summer Research Fellowship. Inducted into Gamma Theta Upsilon (2004), Chris is the recipient of the Hank Emery Award from the Geospatial Information Technology Association and was awarded First Place in the Student Paper Competition by the AAG Remote Sensing Specialty Group.

Given these achievements, Chris holds a paid position in Clark Labs, working with Idrisi software, and has been selected into the inaugural class of Geography's 5th Year MA in GIS. He has presented professional papers at the International Environmetrics Society, the Symposium on Spatial Accuracy Assessment in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, and the Association of American Geographers.

Publications

R G Pontius and C Lippitt. 2004. A method to distinguish real landscape change from map error during map comparison. Conference Proceedings of the joint meeting of The Fifteenth Annual Conference of The International Environmetrics Society and The Sixth Annual Symposium on Spatial Accuracy Assessment in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. Portland, ME.