Erik Lindquist is interested in how human beings use space and, specifically, how this affects ecosystem function at local, regional and global scales. He is currently studying data fusion approaches to large area, high resolution landscape characterization and change detection in the tropical forests of the Congo River Basin. He has lived and worked in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo as a consultant for multiple conservation groups including Wildlife Conservation Society, Frankfurt Zoological Society and World Wide Fund for Nature. For a few years, he owned his own GIS consulting business and worked on numerous conservation projects in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Mexico and Canada. He began his career and spent 7 years with the US Forest Service as a plant ecologist and GIS specialist on the Bridger-Teton National Forest in western Wyoming.

Fig. 1. This picture of a gorilla in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo helps remind me why I spend so much time in front of computers, studying imagery and algorithms, and making maps.
Fig. 2. Large area, high-resolution change detection is difficult in the tropical forest due to many factors including cloud cover and interscene variability. A data fusion approach using a combination of MODIS and Landsat imagery sources is being tested to create regionally consistent depictions of forest cover and change over time. This is a sample Landsat mosaic and associated change detection product taken from Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo(green = forest, white = non-forest, red = high-confidence change from 90’s – 2000’s).