June 1 , 2007

UND Graduate wins NASA Earth System Science Fellowship
Mitchell Schull (B.S. 2003) was recently awarded a prestigious NASA Earth System Science Fellowship. Mitch is in the third year of the post-bachelors Ph.D. program in Boston University's Department of Geography and Environment. He works in Dr. Ranga Myneni's Climate and Vegetation Group under the advisement of Dr. Yuri Knyazikhin.  He is working to extract canopy structure from multi-angle remote sensing data. Extraction of these parameters will lead to better climate models, more accurate retrievals of leaf area index / fraction of photosynthetically active radiation absorbed by plant canopies, and improved biomass estimations. He will present his research at the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) 2007 conference in Barcelona, Spain, July 22-27, 2007.

The abstract from his NASA ESS Fellowship proposal:

Retrieving vertical and horizontal canopy structure from synergistic analysis of multi-angle and Lidar data

Mitchell Schull Department of Geography and Environment, Boston University Recent efforts to use ground truth and lidar to train multi-angle spectral retrievals of vegetation structure have made significant strides toward developing a passive satellite technology for vegetation monitoring. A high correlation between multi-angle spectral data and fractional-area distributions, stand basal area, tree height , forest cover density and biomass has recently been documented. My analyses indicate that multi-angle data are actually more sensitive to the aspect ratio (crown diameter to crown height ratio), and that this is responsible for the observed correlations. Based on this result the aim of this research is to develop and test a physically based approach for ( i ) retrieving the aspect ratio using multi-angle data and ( ii ) tree diameter using the aspect ratio and lidar vertical profile of vegetation surface area. This research will exploit simultaneous availability of AirMISR and airborne LVIS data acquired as part of a NASA Terrestrial Ecology Program aircraft campaign and ground data on canopy structure available for these sites.