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CURRENT RESEARCH:
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NAGEM Research
Group
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The Navigation, Georeferencing, and Mapping
(NaGeM) Research Group at the University of Florida Geomatics
Program is a multidisciplinary team focused on integrating technologies to
create precision georeferenced remote sensing data on mobile platforms. By
developing modular sensor platforms with well defined error models and
flexible integration-oriented architecture, we build a foundation for a
variety of applications. This provides a range of potential systems, from
lightweight unmanned aircraft systems to precision ground-based platforms.
The modular design lends itself to a variety of remote sensing technologies
including, visual, infrared, multispectral, hyperspectral, and LiDAR
imaging.
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Unmanned
Aerial Vehicle Systems for Natural Resource Assessment
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The Florida
Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit's multidisciplinary UAS
research program with the UF Department of Aerospace and
Mechanical Engineering, Micro Air Vehicle Laboratory, the UF School of
Forest Resources and Conservation, Geomatics Program, the UF Fort
Lauderdale Research and Education Center, and others- is developing
unmanned aerial vehicle systems (UAV or UAS) whose goals include the
development of a highly-capable UAV system that is both affordable and
user-friendly for natural resource assessments and monitoring. The systems
offer ease and rapid deployment, simplified transportation to remote
locations that lack runways, and reduced logistical burdens. Using a
custom-designed composite airframe with a customized commercial
autopilot/GPS avionics suite and image-collection systems, georeferenced
imagery from small UAVs can provide the ability to rapidly locate and
assess objects on the ground in specific areas.
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Governance, Land Use and Resource Rights in Southern Africa: Paths toward Grassroots
Democratization Funded by UF Research and Graduate Programs Seed
Fund (2006-2007)
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Southern Africa is at the leading edge of the devolution of
wildlife resource rights to private and communal landholders. We study the linkages between resource rights
and democratization on the one hand, and with economics, land use change
and environmental sustainability on the other. We seek to identify the conditions under
which devolution of governance leads to genuine democratization. We address
this through the lens of land use and resource rights. We contend that
devolution of land use and resource rights will encourage democratization
and economic freedoms, contributing simultaneously to poverty alleviation,
improved governance and environmental sustainability?
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Detection of
potential seepage zones along levees on Lake Okeechobee’s southern shore
using an Unmanned Autonomous Airplane and a Thermal Infrared Camera
Franklin Percival and Adam Watts (USGS Wildlife Cooperative),
Peter Ifu (Aeronautical Engineering), Bon Dewitt, Scot Smith,
Ahmed Mohamed, Amr Abd-Elrahman
Funded by the US Army Corps of Engineers
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Rapid Assessment of Urban Forest Following a Hurricane:
Damage and Debris
Francisco
Escobedo (PI), Mary Duryea, Scot
Smith, Christina Staudhammer, Bon Dewitt,
Ahmed Mohamed
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 The project will develop a preliminary
assessment model for urban forest damage and debris estimates based on the
severity of different windstorm events, remote sensing, and urban forest
structure data. The methods and model will provide city, county, and
regional authorities, preliminary pre-disaster debris planning tools and
post-disaster debris estimates. Utilization of hurricane and urban forest
management wood waste will be explored.
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Infrastructure Change, Human Agency, and
Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems
Funded by National Science Foundation
(2005-2009)…….[“Roadies” interdisciplinary group on UF
campus]
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New roads bring complex
changes to regions, including ecological degradation, social conflict, and economic
development. We focus on human agency as it relates to livelihood decisions
and resource use. We examine how
these factors not only respond to new infrastructure, but also lead to
ecological and institutional changes that in turn generate feedback effects
that impact human well-being. Using an interdisciplinary complex systems
framework we focus on social-ecological systems as integrated wholes via
the interface of infrastructure and land tenure. We draw on the concept of
resilience, a property of complex systems, and reformulate it in terms of
system components, relationships, innovations and continuity. This gives us a means of observing system
properties relevant to the retention or loss of system identity. The research focuses on a global biodiversity
hotspot in the southwestern Amazon where Brazil,
Bolivia and Peru
meet.
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Fire in the Juniper Prairie Wilderness: Is it a viable tool for ecosystem
management?
Leda Kobziar (PI), Janaki Alavalapati, Shibu Jose, Alan Long,
Francis Putz, Kathryn Sieving, Scot Smith,
Taylor Stein, Melvin Sunquist, George Tanner
Funded by the IFAS Innovation Fund
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Inside the Polygon: The Efficacy of Community Tenure in the
Western Property Paradigm.
Funded by
John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (2004-2007)…..[Barnes,
Ankersen, Mueller, Ruppert]
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In this project we examine the historical evolution
of communal land tenure in western legal systems, and its development into
a formal tool to address contemporary development, conservation and human
rights interests. At the same time,
we contrast this against indigenous and/or traditional community-based land
tenure systems. In focusing on the
nexus of these two property traditions we are able to better understand the
dynamics of these complex social-ecological systems through a focus on land
and resource tenure. Through several
case studies in Latin America we analyze
the extent to which communities are embracing or adapting property law and
technological innovation to their own needs, and developing the means and
capacity to record increasingly complex information. From this we draw conclusions concerning
the adaptability and resilience of community tenure arrangements within the
dominant western property paradigm.
Ultimately, our goal is to expand current property and tenure theory
to embrace a more nuanced understanding of community property arrangements
in light of technology and other external drivers.
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Development of Rapid, Affordable Property Surveying
Methods using GPS in Developing Countries
Funded by USAID,
World Bank, DANIDA, U Wisconsin Land Tenure Center and others (1994-)
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Beginning in the early 1990s development banks
like the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) began to make
more funding available for large property formalization projects in LAC and
elsewhere. This funding, and the
corresponding demand for property formalization, led to a huge demand for
boundary surveying as almost every project included a component for
adjudicating and surveying large numbers of parcels in rural areas. These countries were therefore faced with
a sudden need to survey massive numbers of parcels within a relatively
short period of time, typically 4 to 5 years. Conventional surveying approaches for
rural parcels would not meet the time and cost constraints posed by these
projects. In addition, since these
projects were often aimed at poorer rural land holders, who were mostly
occupying low value land, the cost of a conventional survey could actually
exceed the value of the parcel in rural areas. There was therefore a huge
demand for an alternative methodology that was less costly and more
efficient.
In this research we have used sub-meter accuracy
GPS as the basis for developing a rapid and cost-effective methodology for
cadastral surveying in developing countries. We have tested and
demonstrated this methodology in Albania,
Peru, Belize, Nicaragua,
Trinidad and Tobago and Bolivia.
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Recent
Projects:
Maintenance and Sustainability of Property
Formalization and Land Administration Systems.
Partial funding through Land Tenure
Center (St. Lucia) (2003-
)………..[Barnes, Griffith-Charles]
Modeling
Feasibility and Impacts of Water Transfer in Florida using Linear Programming and
GIS.
Funded by SNRE
(2003-2004)…………………..[Barnes, Hildebrand, Jones, Fraisse, Tripathi]
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