| Professors in the Field |
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Robert Gilmore Pontius, Jr.
Associate Professor of Geographic Information Sciences for Development and Environment
E-mail: rpontius@clarku.edu
Tel: (508) 793-7761
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Robert Gilmore Pontius, Jr. teaches in Clark University's Department of
International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE) and Graduate School
of Geography as Associate Professor. His areas of expertise are; Geographic
Information Science (GIS), Quantitative Environmental Modeling, Land Change
Science, and Statistics. Here at Clark, he coordinates the Master of Arts
program in GIS for Development and Environment, teaches Geographic Information
Sciences, Quantitative Modeling, Statistics, advises in the Human Environment
Regional Observatory research program, conducts funded research and supervises
research assistants, advises Doctoral, Masters and Bachelors students, and
advises on several committees.
Previously, he worked as an Associate Scientist at the Tellus Institute &
Stockholm Environment Institute and analyzed environmental sustainability and
conducted GIS-based modeling. He also served as Assistant Professor at Boston
University, where he researched and taught in the Dept. of Geography and Center
for Energy & Environmental Studies. He also held various positions for the State
University of New York, Ohio State University, the United States Department of
Agriculture and the United States Peace Corps in Tanzania.
Professor Pontius received the Michael Brehney Prize for best paper in
Environment and Planning B 2005 and was the invited Keynote Speaker at the
Spatial Accuracy conference in Lisbon Portugal in 2006. He also received the
Clark Hodgkins Prize for excellence in scholarship, teaching and service and the
Oliver and Dorothy Hayden Junior Faculty Fellow. He has published over 55
articles, some in collaboration with his students and served as a reviewer for
countless peer articles and over ten major grants. He has also been a panelist
and advisor for several international and national professional scientific
advisory committees.
This past year, he continued his longstanding tradition of co-authoring research with his students as is the case with Christopher D. Lippitt and others in “Comparing the input, output, and validation maps for several models of land change” in the Annals of Regional Science (2008), with Olufunmilayo Thontteh and Hao Chen in “Components of information for multiple resolution comparison between maps that share a real variable” in Environmental and Ecological Statistics (2008) with Clement Alo in “Identifying systematic land cover transitions using remote sensing and GIS: The fate of forests inside and outside protected areas of Southwestern Ghana” in Environment and Planning B (2008) and with Robert Yao-Kumah and others in “Accuracy assessment for a simulation model of Amazonian deforestation” in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (2007). Pontius has recently been named to the editorial boards for both the International Journal of Geographical Information Science and Landscape Ecology.
Pontius is co-investigator on two major grants received in 2007 from the National Science Foundation’s Coupled Natural Human Systems Program. The first is entitled “Suburbanization, Water-Use, Nitrogen Cycling & Eutrophication in the 21st Century: Interactions, Feedbacks & Uncertainties in a Massachusetts Costal Zone” for which he and Clark Professor Colin Polsky won four years of research funding ($1,442,930) for 2007–2011. The other ($20,000) is part of a supplement to the aforementioned grant.
He was the invited Keynote Speaker at the Southern Forestry and Natural Resources GIS conference in Orlando, FL in March 2008. In addition to speaking engagements in the past year, he presented “Lessons and challenges for land change modelers as revealed by a comparison of thirteen cases” at the conference on the science and education of land use: a transatlantic multidisciplinary approach in Washington, D.C. Internationally, he presented lectures and conducted workshops on “Map comparison to assess the prediction of vegetation response to El Nino in Southern Africa” at the World Congress of the International Association for Landscape Ecology in Wageningen, The Netherlands, “Lessons from the first decade of running a Master of Arts program in Geographic Information Science in the United States” at the Electronic Culture and New Humanitarian Technologies of the XXI century in Astrakhan, Russia and conducted a workshop in Land Change Modeling for Carbon Offset Projects for Conservation International in Quito, Ecuador with GISDE student Oh Kim.
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. He teaches courses in GIS, statistics, and quantitative modeling. Pontius is the creator of Geomod, a computer model that analyzes land use patterns and extrapolates them into the future. His current research examines how to prevent deforestation from threatening biodiversity in India, how to prevent deforestation from releasing greenhouse gasses in the Amazon and how to prevent deforestation from disturbing nutrient flows in Massachusetts.
Selected Publications:
Names in italics are Clark University students.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore, Wideke Boersma, Jean-Christophe Castella, Keith Clarke, Ton de Nijs, Charles Dietzel, Duan Zengqiang, Eric Fotsing, Noah Goldstein, Kasper Kok, Eric Koomen, Christopher D. Lippitt, William McConnell, Bryan Pijanowski, Snehal Pithadia, Alias Mohd Sood, Sean Sweeney, Tran Ngoc Trung, A. Tom Veldkamp, and Peter H. Verburg. in press. Comparing the input, output, and validation maps for several models of land change. Annals of Regional Science.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore, Olufunmilayo Thontteh and Hao Chen. in press. Components of information for multiple resolution comparison between maps that share a real variable. Environmental and Ecological Statistics.
Alo, Clement and Robert Gilmore Pontius Jr. in press. Identifying systematic land cover transitions using remote sensing and GIS: The fate of forests inside and outside protected areas of Southwestern Ghana. Environment and Planning B.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore, Robert Walker, Robert Yao-Kumah, Eugeino Arima, Stephen Aldrich, Marcellus Caldas and Dante Vergara. in press. Accuracy assessment for a simulation model of Amazonian deforestation. Annals of the Association of American Geographers.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore, Anna J Versluis and Nicholas R Malizia. 2006. Visualizing certainty of extrapolations from models of land change. Landscape Ecology 21(7) p.1151-1166.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore and Christopher D Lippitt. 2006. Can error explain map differences over time? Cartography and Geographic Information Science 33(2) p.159-171.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore and Joseph Spencer. 2005. Uncertainty in extrapolations of predictive land change models. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 32 p.211-230.
Fedorko, Evan, Robert Gilmore Pontius Jr, Stephen Aldrich, Luc
Claessens, Charles Hopkinson Jr and Wilfred Wolheim. 2005. Spatial distribution
of land type in regression models of pollutant loading. Journal of Spatial
Hydrology 5(2) p.60-80.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore, Diana Huffaker and Kevin Denman. 2004. Useful techniques of validation for spatially explicit land-change models. Ecological Modelling 179(4) p.445-461.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore and Nicholas R Malizia. 2004. Effect of category aggregation on map comparison. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3234 p.251-268. in M J Egenhofer, C Freksa, and H J Miller (eds): GIScience2004.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore and Pablo Pacheco. 2004. Calibration and validation of a model of forest disturbance in the Western Ghats, India 1920 - 1990. GeoJournal 61(4) p.325-334.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore, Emily Shusas and Menzie McEachern. 2004. Detecting important categorical land changes while accounting for persistence. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 101(2-3) p.251-268.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore and Beth Suedmeyer. 2004. Components of agreement in categorical maps at multiple resolutions. p.233-251. Chapter 17 in Ross S Lunetta and John G Lyon (eds). Remote Sensing and GIS Accuracy Assessment. CRC Press: Boca Raton FL.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore, Aditya Agrawal and Diana Huffaker. 2003. Estimating the uncertainty of land-cover extrapolations while constructing a raster map from tabular data. Journal of Geographical Systems 5(3) p.253-273.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore and Kiran Batchu. 2003. Using the relative operating characteristic to quantify certainty in prediction of location of land cover change in India. Transactions in GIS 7(4) p.467-484.
Holden, Matthew, Christopher Lippitt, Robert Gilmore Pontius Jr and Carissa Williams. 2003. Building a database of historic land cover to detect landscape change. Biological Bulletin 205 p.257-258.
Huffaker, Diana and Robert Gilmore Pontius Jr. 2002. Reconstruction of Historical Land Cover in the Ipswich Watershed. Biological Bulletin 203 p.253-254.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore, Joseph Cornell and Charles A S Hall. 2001. Modeling the spatial pattern of land-use change with GEOMOD2: application and validation for Costa Rica. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 85(1-3) p.191-203.
Schneider, Laura and Robert Gilmore Pontius Jr. 2001. Modeling land-use change in the Ipswich watershed, Massachusetts, USA. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 85(1-3) p.83-94.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore. 2000. Quantification error versus location error in comparison of categorical maps. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing 66(8) p.1011-1016.
Professor Pontius is responsible for several modules that are in the GIS software Idrisi. The modules relate to the following publications:
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore and Mang Lung Cheuk. 2006. A generalized cross-tabulation matrix to compare soft-classified maps at multiple resolutions. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 20(1) p.1-30.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore and Jeffrey Malanson. 2005. Comparison of the structure and accuracy of two land change models. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 19(2) p.243-265.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore. 2002. Statistical methods to partition effects of quantity and location during comparison of categorical maps at multiple resolutions. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing 68(10) p.1041-1049.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore and Laura Schneider. 2001. Land-use change model validation by a ROC method for the Ipswich watershed, Massachusetts, USA. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 85(1-3) p.239-248.
To read more about Professor Pontius' accomplishments, please click here.
Professor Gil Pontius on student-faculty research at Clark:
"Student-faculty research is the hallmark of Clark University. I engage in student-faculty research because it is fun and interesting. It is wonderful to work with students simultaneously as a mentor and as a peer. Students learn how to function as a professional by doing professional level work. Frequently, they teach me by showing me the surprising things they have uncovered. I guide them in numerous aspects of research, from establishing a research agenda to coaching them in how to make effective oral presentations, which students make at competitive conferences. Nearly all of my publications are co-authored with Clark students who are my advisees. Students who work with me engage in the entire scientific process from data gathering to formal publication in professional peer-reviewed scientific journals. My student-faculty research is a win-win situation, since we all get the satisfaction of doing meaningful, high-level work that has relevance beyond the Clark campus. Much of the work I have done with students has served as the intellectual basis of international scientific efforts, and has resulted in modules in the GIS software Idrisi, which gives us an audience of 35000 GIS users worldwide. Now that is truly rewarding!"
Land-Use Change is one topic that links all of the research of Pontius and his students. This topic concerns the science of how and why humans transform landscapes, and of the consequences of such transformations. Many professors at Clark University are recognized authorities on land-use change, and have on-going research projects in which students can become involved (read more). This topic has served as the basis for research by GISDE students, specifically: Alo, Spencer, Denman, Van Fossen.
Quantitative Methods for map comparison is the topic for which Pontius is perhaps best known. Pontius and his students derive novel methods that use high-school level mathematics to perform analysis that is more useful than more-complicated contemporary analysis. Therefore, the newly derived methods are intellectually accessible to a large array of scientists. These methods ultimately constitute the foundation of new modules in . For example, Idrisi's VALIDATE and ROC modules are the result of Pontius' collaboration with Clark University students. This topic has served as the basis for research by GISDE students, specifically: Suedmeyer, Cheuk, Kuzera, Thontteh.
Watershed Management is one of the most common specific environmental applications of GIS-related research at Clark University. Pontius works with ecologists from the Marine Biological Laboratory to examine the influence of land-use on water quality in the
Plum Island Ecosystems, in northeastern Massachusetts. This site concerns management in the watershed of the Ipswich River, which is the third most threatened river in the United States. This project is part of the world-renowned Long Term Ecological Research program funded by the National Science Foundation. This topic has served as the basis for research by GISDE students, specifically: Fedorko, Agrawal, Parker, Tada, Menard.
Public Participation is an important part of GIS in which Clark University students learn by doing. Pontius and his students are active members of community groups concerned with environmental quality in Worcester Massachusetts and beyond. These groups include the
Tatnuck Brook Watershed Association, the
Blackstone River Coalition, and the Worcester Mayor's Roundtable on Brownfields. Clark University students regularly become involved in performing GIS services for these groups. This topic has served as the basis for research by GIDE students, specifically: Swain.
Brownfields Redevelopment is perhaps the most important development issue for the City of Worcester, and certainly a crucial for environmental sustainability worldwide. Clark University students obtain direct experience in working with local professionals in tackling this important topic. For example, Clark University students regularly make presentations of their GIS-based research to the Mayor's Roundtable Forum in the City Council chambers as part of their internships with the City's GIS department. This topic has served as the basis for Clark University students, specifically, Sinha, Mets, Cox.
Human/Environment Interactions is an area of expertise for many Clark University professors. For example, Pontius is supervisor of Clark University's
Human Environment Regional Observatory (HERO), which is funded by the National Science Foundation. HERO establishes Clark University as a center for data and analysis of issues on the human and environment interface in Massachusetts. This topic has served as the basis for research by GIDE students, specifically: Petrova.
Biodiversity Conservation is a globally important issue that is intimately linked to land-use and other topics on which Clark University professors have expertise. Pontius has been collaborating with scientists from India since 1996 in order to formulate policy to preserve biodiversity in India (www.atree.org). This topic has served as the basis for research by GIDE students, specifically: Batchu, Gupta.
Climate Change is one of the largest challenges facing humanity. It is relevant to land-use change because forests play an important role in regulating climate. Pontius has a long standing relationship with
Winrock International, which does applied GIS analysis concerning the connection between land use and global climate change. This research includes assessment of some of the largest forestry-based carbon management projects in the world. Winrock International has hired many GISDE graduates to perform analysis worldwide. This topic as served as the basis for research by GIDE students, specifically: Paladino, Dushku, Moore.
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