July 31, 2015
K-State geographer, engineer present research at European remote sensing conferences
Shawn Hutchinson, associate professor of geography, and Stacy Hutchinson, professor of biological and agricultural engineering, recently presented research on military training land sustainability and grassland monitoring at two European remote sensing conferences in Sweden and France.
The Hutchinsons presented "Military Training and Fire Regime Impacts on Tallgrass Prairie Vegetation Degradation" at the second European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratories, or EARSeL, Workshop on Temporal Analysis of Satellite Imagery, June 17-19, at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
They also presented "A Statistical Approach for Predicting Grassland Degradation in Disturbance-driven Landscapes" at the eighth International Workshop on the Analysis of Multitemporal Remote Sensing Images, MultTemp 2015, at the Université de Savoie July 22-24 in Annecy, France.
This work featured ongoing grassland monitoring efforts conducted with scientists from France, including Anne Jacquin, Université de Toulouse, INPT, Ecole d'Ingénieurs de Purpan, and Michel Goulard, Institut National pour la Recherche Agronomique. This K-State-led international collaboration seeks improved methods for evaluating the condition of grasslands using remotely-sensed images and distinguishing between changes caused by anthropogenic activities versus those that are natural or a function of weather and climate. Specific results presented at the conferences detailed relationships between fire and long-term trends in tallgrass prairie vegetation at Fort Riley and Konza Prairie Biological Station.