Robert Gilmore Pontius, Jr.
Research Associate Professor

The George Perkins Marsh Institute
Clark University
Worcester, MA 01610-1477
508.793.7761 phone
email: rpontius@clarku.edu

Current Research Interests

• NSF-funded research to model how economic activity affects land-use change and hence nutrient flows in the Long Term Ecological Research site in Ipswich, Massachusetts.


• Development and use of GEOMOD2 to simulate land-use change in Costa Rica and two locations in India in order to examine how deforestation threatens biodiversity.


• Collaboration with Oxfam America to use GIS both to secure land rights for indigenous people in the Amazon and to carry out joint implementation projects to abate carbon dioxide emissions.


• Training of middle and high school teachers and students to use GIS for community development projects in order to address gang violence and urban pollution.

Selected Publications

Pontius, Gil R., Jr., and J. Malanson. 2005. Comparison of the structure and accuracy of two land change models. International Journal of Geographical Information Science. 19 no. 2: 243-265.

Pontius, Gil R., Jr., E. Shusas, and M. McEachern. 2004. Detecting important categorical land changes while accounting for persistence. Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Environment 101 (2-3): 251-268.

Pontius, Gil R., Jr., A. Agrawal, and D. Huffaker. 2003. Estimating the uncertainty of land-cover extrapolations while constructing a raster map from tabular data. Journal of Geographical Systems 5 (3): 253-273.

Pontius, Gil R., Jr., and K. 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): 467-484.

Pontius, Gil R., Jr. 2000. Quantification error versus location error in comparison of categorical maps. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing 66 no. 8: 1011-1016.