Dr. Matthew Hansen (Co-Director) is a remote sensing scientist at SDSU with a research specialization in large area land cover and land use change mapping. Dr. Hansen's research is focused on developing improved algorithms, data inputs and thematic outputs which enable the mapping of land cover change at regional, continental and global scales. Such maps enable better informed approaches to natural resource management, including deforestation and biodiversity monitoring and can also be used by other scientists as inputs to carbon, climate and hydrological modeling studies. Dr. Hansen is currently an Associate Team Member of NASA's MODIS Land Science Team, responsible for the algorithmic development and product delivery of time-series maps of global forest cover, croplands and other vegetation cover types. He also works on mapping deforestation within the Congo Basin as part of the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment, a USAID-funded project. Other current research includes improving global cropland monitoring capabilities for the Foreign Agriculture Service of the USDA. Dr. Hansen entered the field of remote sensing after serving with the Peace Corps in Zaire and has a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Maryland, M.A. in Geography and M.S.E. in Civil Engineering from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and a B.E.E. in Electrical Engineering from Auburn University.

Fig. 1. Precent land cover map of North America in three components: tree canopy cover (red), herbaceous and shrub cover (green), and bare ground (blue), summing to 100 percent. Such maps enable the monitoring of land cover and land use over time.
Fig. 2. Hot spots of change map for forest cover in South America, 1982-1999, derived from time-series percent tree cover maps. Black outlines represent areas detected in automated fashion using remotely sensed data sets, red outlines represent areas delineated based on expert opinion only. Results from this study showed an increase in the global rate of deforestation during the 1990's compared to the 1980's, in contradiction to data from the Forest Resource Assessment Programme of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization.