PhD (University of Wisconsin)
MSc (University of Wisconsin)
MSc (Georgia Institute of Technology)
BSc (Carnegie Mellon University)
Short Bio
Jeff is a professor at Â鶹AV who studies land-cover change, forest connectivity, and lake carbon content. He works on large environmental questions at regional, continental, and global scales using a wide variety of approaches, including remote sensing, GIS, supercomputing, simulation modeling, and cutting-edge techniques in computer science. As a teacher, he has taught around 1000 students about geographic information systems at Â鶹AV. Born in Pennsylvania, Jeff graduated from the well-regarded computer science program at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. After several years in the private sector at Bell Communications Research, he left the corporate world for graduate school, where he earned two M.S. degrees, with a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For his Ph.D. research he created one of the first maps of agriculture and pasture use across the entire Amazon basin, then developed a model of water and carbon cycling across 7000 lakes in Northern Wisconsin for his postdoc at UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology. As a professor he developed forest connectivity maps across all of Canada, regional assessments of carbon content in lakes, and algorithms to assess land-cover change across the entire 40-year satellite record in collaboration with Google’s powerful Earth Engine platform.
Research Interests
With the dramatic increase in availability and accessibility of spatial data through advances in remote sensing and GIS, virtual globes, and computing power, coming decades will reward research that uses these revolutionary new ways of viewing, interpreting, and forecasting changes in environmental systems. Using a wide array of approaches, I explore the impact of abiotic, biotic, and human factors on spatial patterns at multiple scales. My research focuses on both basic and applied questions of environmental change across large areas, paying particular attention to issues having an explicit spatial component. My group’s research addresses several disciplines, including landscape ecology, remote sensing, and data handling and visualization.
Current Research
(1) development and application of a new algorithm for updating land-cover classifications capable of ingesting data from multiple sensors of varying quality and specifications;
(2) the development and interpretation of a forest connectivity dataset for all of Canada;
(3) the estimation of lake carbon content from satellite imagery of northern-hemisphere lakes.
Environmental Biology: Applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analysis techniques to the presentation and analysis of ecological information, including sources and capture of spatial data; characterizing, transforming, displaying spatial data; and spatial analysis to solve resource management problems.
Offered by: Natural Resource Sciences
Prerequisite(s): At least one environmental science course and one ecology course or permission of instructor
Environmental Biology: An advanced spatial analysis course that uses rapidly developing techniques in GIS and remote sensing to solve problems in natural resource management. Focuses on controlling spatial operations through programming.
Environment: This course deals with how scientific-technological, socio-economic, political-institutional and behavioural factors mediate society-environment interactions. Issues discussed include population and resources; consumption, impacts and institutions; integrating environmental values in societal decision-making; and the challenges associated with, and strategies for, promoting sustainability. Case studies in various sectors and contexts are used.
Offered by: Bieler School of Environment
Fall
Section 001: Downtown Campus
Section 051: Macdonald Campus
Terms
Fall 2024
Instructors
Madhav Govind Badami, Jeffrey A Cardille, Geoffrey Garver
Environment: Techniques used in design and completion of environmental research projects. Problem definition, data sources and use of appropriate strategies and methodologies. Principles underlying research design are emphasized, including critical thinking, recognizing causal relationships, ideologies and bias in research, and when and where to seek expertise.
Offered by: Bieler School of Environment
Fall - Downtown campus; Winter - Macdonald campus
Section 001: Downtown Campus
Section 051: Macdonald Campus
Restrictions: Restricted to U2 or higher
Prerequisite(s): Completion of U1 Required courses in Environment, or permission of instructor.
