David is a member of the US Land Processes (LP) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) User Working Group (UWG). He participated in a Technical Exchange Meeting between the LPDAAC and the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) UWGs, Washington DC May 8-9th 2013, and co-chaired a session concerning DAAC support of the U.S. National Climate Assessment indicator activities.

(1)    On 25APR13, Geoff Henebry gave a seminar at the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in São José dos Campos entitled “Land Surface Phenology, Synoptic Ecology, and the challenge of sorting change from variation in observational data. Twenty years ago Henebry was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at INPE, investigating how synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data could be used to monitor flooding dynamics in the Pantanal, a vast wetland in central-west Brazil.

(1)    GIScCE Center Scholar Cole Krehbiel presented a talk entitled “Exploring MODIS band 23 for urban remote sensing: Seasonal and view angle effects” at the Joint Urban Remote Sensing Event (JURSE) in São Paulo, Brazil on 23APR13. The paper was co-authored by GIScCE scientists Geoff Henebry and Val Kovalskyy.

David Roy is a member of the GOFC-GOLD Fire Implementation team and he attended the GOFC-GOLD Symposium and Fire Implementation meeting, Wageningen University, Holland, April 15-19th 2013.  View more details here: 

http://gofc-fire.umd.edu/meeting/static/Netherlands_2013/index.php

Dr. Valeriy Kovalskyy attended a DIRSIG training session, April 9-11, 2013 in Flagstaff, AZ.  The DIRSIG model is a first principles based synthetic image generation model developed by the Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Laboratory at Rochester Institute of Technology (http://dirsig.org/). The model can produce passive single-band, multi-spectral or hyper-spectral imagery from the visible through the thermal infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum and can be used to test image system designs, to create test imagery for evaluating image exploitation algorithms and for creating data for training image analysts.

David Roy gave a 20 minute presentation concerning his and his colleagues NASA funded research.  Roy, D.P., Yan, L., White, E., Kovalskyy, V., Loveland, T., Changing Field Sizes of the Conterminous United States, a Decennial Landsat Assessment, 2013 NASA Spring Land Cover Land Use Science Team Meeting, Rockville, Maryland, April 2-4 2013.

David Roy,  Valeriy Kovalskyy and Sanath Kumar attended as VIP guests the successful launch of the NASA USGS Landsat Data Continuity Mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base, CA  (http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/LDCM-launch.html) and attended the associated Landsat Science Team meeting, Buellton, CA, February 11 – 14th 2013.

David Roy was elected co-chair of the Landsat Science team at the kickoff meeting of the new  (2012-2017) Landsat Science Team, Washington, DC, December 12-13, 2012.

Drs. Roy and Kovalskyy participated in the  Eleventh Earth Science Data Systems Working Group (ESDSWG) Meeting, November 13th - 15th,  2012, Annapolis, Maryland. The ESDSWG is comprised of working groups organized around key technology and information system issues. The ESDSWG focuses on the exploration and development of recommendations derived from pertinent community insights of NASA's heterogeneous and distributed Earth science data systems.

Senior Scientists Mike Wimberly and Gabriel Senay along with graduate student Alemayehu Midekisa traveled to Bahir Dar, Ethiopia to deliver a workshop on Geographic Information Science for Climate and Health Applications from September 4-5, 2012. Participants included public health professionals with the Health, Development, and Anti-Malaria Association (HDAMA) and the Amhara Regional Health Bureau. The purpose of the workshop was to transfer knowledge gained and products developed through an NIH-funded research project aimed at applying environmental monitoring data from earth observing satellites for malaria risk mapping and forecasting. Afterwards, the GIScCE scientists conducted field work in support of Alemayehu’s dissertation research, collecting ground-truth data on the locations of seasonal wetlands, irrigated agriculture, and other land cover types hypothesized to serve as hot spots for mosquito breeding and focal points for malaria outbreaks.

During 6-10 August, Geoff Henebry participated in the 8th International Conference on Urban Climate in Dublin, Ireland, where he gave a talk entitled "Seeing through the haze: Urbanization dynamics at 4 microns". Dr. Valeriy Kovalskyy was the co-author.

Drs. David Roy and Val Kovalskyy spent a week July 17-20^th 2012 at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Pretoria, South Africa to discuss collaborative research on how to develop NASA funded WELD project (http://weld.cr.usgs.gov/) capabilities for South African application in support of South African government Earth Observation and monitoring programs. They were hosted at the Meraka Institute (African Advanced Institute for Information and Communication Technology) and held discussions with staff from Meraka and the South African National Space Agency.

Dr. Giuseppe Amatulli gave a seminar “An overview of the NASA  Web Enabled Landsat Data (WELD) project - An Introduction to a training course on handling WELD products using Open Source Software” and then a two day training course at University of Exeter, Environment and Sustainability Institute, Summer School on GIS analysis and data-processing, U.K. 11^th -13^th of July 2012.