Ellen O. White Receives Student Aspiration Merit Award

Oct 7, 2021 | News

Ph.D. candidate Ellen O. White recently received the Student Aspiration Merit Award for a Multimedia Session at the International Conference on Ecology and Transportation (ICOET). The ICOET Steering Committee grants the awards to students or recent graduates presenting their research as the primary author at either a poster session or lectern talk at the bi-annual conference. Ellen’s presentation, titled “Quantifying highway agency roadside tree removal using high-resolution satellite data” reviewed large-scale tree removal by state highway agencies along roadsides. These actions are often classified as maintenance projects, which have no environmental or public review requirements. Many states do not track the tree removal and thus the highway agencies cannot assess the environmental trade-offs of their actions. In this study, she used USDA Farm Service Agency’s National Agriculture Imagery Program one-meter imagery and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) Image Analysis in ArcGIS to analyze the before and after greenness along roadsides in Chatham County, Georgia. Results included maps of cleared areas and an estimate of total ha/acres lost.