Dr. Kate Beard among Lead Investigators to Better Understand Complex Forest Landscape Changes
Dr. Kate Beard-Tisdale, Spatial Informatics Professor in the School of Computing and Information Science, is among five lead investigators recently receiving a $3 million NSF grant for Leveraging Intelligent Informatics and Smart Data for Improved Understanding of Northern Forest Ecosystem Resiliency.
The four-year, multidisciplinary regional project is led by the University of Maine. The project was actually awarded $6 million from the National Science Foundation, with $3 million contingent on project progress and availability of funds. The project brings together researchers from UMaine, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Vermont to advance fundamental knowledge of forest ecosystem resilience through integration, analysis and visualization of complex data streams and models covering the region’s northern forest.
The project will build on expertise and facilities across the three universities to integrate emerging computational, monitoring, remote sensing and visualization technologies into a digital framework. The framework will create a natural laboratory for scientific experimentation by providing comprehensive spatial and temporal measurements of the forest that can be readily accessed by scientists, land managers and policymakers.
Lead investigators include Dr. Aaron Weiskittel (PI) and the Co-PIs of Drs. Kate Beard, Scott Ollinger, Ali Abedi, and Anthony D’Amato. Drs. Torsten Hahmann and Silvia Nittel from the School of Computing and Information Science are also participating as senior research investigators. For further information, consult the full campus news release and NSF’s EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement program.