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Panel Notes: GIS in a career James Duffy – spatial data, GIS and remote sensing  Part one: Institute of Zoology  Used satellite called AVHRR looked at ‘vegetation greenness from space’, collects data every 16 to 30 days  Looking at seasonality process of vegetation greening up and dying down, data is married up with estimations of climate change impacts – monitor effect of climate change in Africa  African elephant population data married up with satellite data – can one tell us about the other, more elephants in a national park with more greenness over time?  Allows us to look at these issues on larger scales than would be possible from the ground  Using vegetation cover as a proxy, we can look at how 23-30 years’ worth of data, by looking at national parks (untouched by humans) we can see how ecosystem functioning is changing over time      

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Part 2: employed as a research technician at Exeter, providing GIS support to a large diverse research group. Focus on how night time lighting effects the ecosystem in terrestrial and marine environments Looking at balancing agricultural land designation with biodiversity cost – IUCM Cacti assessment produced red list of conservation status of species In order to do this, need to gather spatial data of where particular species occur, gather data and digitise this information for world to use in the future Fusing the protected area dataset with night-time brightness information. Cacti assessment – involved creating a map, looks at agriculture, bio resource use and residential development, this information is fused together to identift hotspots where you might want to invest into conservation to have the biggest effect in saving the most species. What makes GIS so powerful is that behind the spatial information comes a lot of complimentary attribute data, information about how threats occur/when data was collected etc. – huge database

Part 3: using drones/kites to create images of coastal areas Smaller scale – proximal remote sensing, different resolution Look at seagrass habitat mapping, aim to come up with a management tool and look at how we can assess this change overtime  if pixel is this color class it as vegetated, if this then count it as non-vegetated, use this classification to help inform decision making with regards to turtle conservation  using a kite and an attached camera to produce Arial photographs of a sand dune area, stitch these photos together to create a digital 3D model  repeat this process in three months with management implementations in mind and see where the dunes are eroding/vegetation changes/footpath erosion  try to understand terminology and processes that can be used in GIS software such as grass GIS / arc GIS Mike Williams – Landmark  what does landmark do   

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formed on the back of recent government acts – the environmental protection act saying that the polluter pays focus on land and property, when you buy a property you get a report on it used for commercial markets, large databases, data for these reports are bought help surveyors by letting them know about flooding/mining nearby turning data into spatial information and analysing it what is my role Data Research Consultant Help businesses to access data and looks at where data can be sourced from – using meta data to understand it Legislation and what we can do with data Making sure customers are licenced to use data Drones/satellite data Now use mobile phone to access data Initial sourcing/analysis to find new datasets...