Current Lab Members
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Morgan A. Crowley
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PhD Candidate (Department of Natural Resource Sciences)
Research Interests: fire mapping, disturbance detection, Remote sensing, multi-source data synthesis, Landsat, Sentinel-2, MODIS, Google Earth Engine, Bayesian Updating of Land Cover algorithm Extreme fire seasons are becoming increasingly common across Canada, and annual burned area is predicted to escalate. Widespread and large fires impact ecosystem services such as timber supply, wildlife habitat, and carbon storage, and diminished air quality has a detrimental effect on human health and well-being. Accurate maps of active fire progression can help stakeholders fight fires, better understand how they burn, and model future landscape disturbance and subsequent impacts on ecosystem services. The primary objective of my thesis is to develop data fusion methods to produce and analyse decades of fire progressions at the provincial level. By using novel classification and data-fusion methods to refine burned-area mapping, this dataset and subsequent analyses hope to offer insights to the fields of fire ecology and disturbance monitoring. ResearchGate OrcID Google Scholar
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Africa Flores-Anderson
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PhD Candidate (Department of Natural Resource Sciences)
Research Interests: Land Use Land Cover Change (LCLUC), remote sensing, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), water quality, hyper spectral, forest monitoring, time series analysis, AI Tropical forests display very dynamic rates of change due to human intervention, with a trend towards forest loss. In the last decade technological advances have allowed scientists to map historical forest cover change globally using archives of satellite data. However, decision makers need national level estimations and understanding of more subtle forest disturbances to take appropriate measures to protect their forests. My research interest lies in the use of Earth observations from passive and active sensors to provide useful and timely information that will enable decision makers to enhance the management of their forest and water resources. I also work in monitoring and forecasting algae blooms in fresh-water bodies using satellite data and machine learning. I’m originally from Guatemala and hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Agricultural Engineering with focus in Natural Renewable Resources from Universidad de San Carlos in Guatemala, and a MSc in Earth System Science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. ResearchGate
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Flavie Pelletier
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Incoming PhD Student (Department of Natural Resource Sciences)
Research Interests: fire mapping, Google Earth Engine, Remote sensing I completed my undergraduate degree in Forestry at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and a dual master degree in forest sciences at the University of Freiburg, Germany and the University of British Columbia. For my final master project, I worked with US Forest Inventory Analysis plots and burn severity data acquired through Landsat. The goal was to most accurately model the burn severity of the national inventory plots. As I move, to a PhD, I am hoping to work with satellite imagery to map wildfires through time. The last few years spent living in British Columbia have made me privy to the impacts of wildfires and have deepen my will to understand how they move through the landscape. |
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Eliza Sarah Deutsch
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Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Research Interests: Aquatic ecosystem ecology, global change, aquatic monitoring in data-poor regions, statistical modeling, remote sensing, GIS. Eliza is working on a Canada-wide multi-university and multi-agency project assessing the health of lakes across the country. Her work involves developing empirical remote sensing algorithms for predicting water clarity, modeling the relationship between lake biochemistry, lake optical properties and watershed characteristics to develop an index of health, and then interpolating the assessment of health to all lakes in Canada. ResearchGate |
Elijah Perez
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MSc of Natural Resource Sciences
Research Interests: Fire mapping, remote sensing, Landsat, Sentinel-2, BULC (Bayesian Updating of Land-Cover), GIS Eli completed his undergraduate degree at McGill University in Environmental Biology specializing in Wildlife Biology and is now a first year masters student in NRS. His remote sensing work, under the supervision of professor Jeff Cardille, allows him to blend his scientific and professional interests at the intersection of remote sensing, cloud computing, and the natural world. He hopes to improve the detection of forest disturbances in British Columbia with potential application Canada wide, helping to improve forest management. Google Scholar ResearchGate |
Talia Koll-Egyed
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MSc of Natural Resource Sciences
Research Interests: Lakes, Coloured dissolved organic matter, Secchi disk depth, Remote sensing, Landsat- 8, Sentinel-2, Google Earth Engine Canada is rich in freshwater resources, boasting approximately 20% of the global supply. These resources are under increasing human pressure, with climate change already impacting both the availability and quality of freshwater. Despite their importance in Canada, a national-scale accounting of lake water parameters has, until very recently, been impossible. With the large field effort of the NSERC Lake Pulse Strategic Network, hundreds of lakes have been sampled as the basis for a nationwide lake assessment. Yet with hundreds of thousands of never-sampled lakes to consider, satellite data provides the only viable means for extensive monitoring of these bodies of water. The primary objective of my thesis is to develop algorithms to predict the concentration of coloured dissolved organic matter and Secchi disk depth. This research will expand our knowledge of lake water quality parameters at a country-wide scale and provide a baseline estimate for carbon content in the lakes of Canada. |
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Eleanor Stern
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M.Sc. Student of Natural Resource Science (specializing in Wildlife Biology)
Research Interests: Wildlife science, wildlife epidemiology/disease, local and expert wildlife knowledge, conservation biology. As a masters student at McGill, I'm a full time student and nature enthusiast. I've wanted to be a wildlife scientist for as long as I can remember, and I'm thrilled to be working on my current moose project. In the past, I've done research projects on geophysics with Dr. Jeff Gu, forest fragmentation with Dr. Scott Nielsen, and wildlife disease with Dr. Eveyln Merrill. I'd like to continue down the wildlife conservation path at the PhD level, whether that be focused on disease, habitat use, behaviour, or ecology. I'm most interested in applied, tangible projects and research with real-world impacts, and research with a strong quantitative or modeling component. My interests outside of research include horse riding, knitting, and backpacking (which I'm good at), piano (which I'm mediocre at), and archery (which I'm just learning). I believe the best scientists are well rounded people with varied interests and hobbies, and I strive to continue learning new things and expanding my horizons while I continue my masters degree. Current Project: I am currently conducting my masters project on moose habitat use in Eeyou Istchee, Quebec. As part of a large team of students and professors, my role is to harmonize Cree expert knowledge and systematic GPS collar and forestry data to make resource selection function (RSF) models for moose. This will help to quantitatively answer questions important to the local communities, such as determining how forestry activities are impacting moose habitat use and behaviour. Google Scholar Research Gate |
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Bryant M. Serre
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M.Sc. Candidate of Natural Resource Sciences.
Research Interests: Landscape Ecology, Scale in Ecology, Ecotoxicology, Environmental Philosophy The issue of scale in ecology continues to be important in building the link between ecological patterns to process. Interacting with scale tripartite (incl. temporality, spatial extent, and resolution) Bryant's research under the supervision of Dr. Cardille focuses on how we evaluate and rationalize the appropriate scales to study any set of ecological processes. His work contributes to the larger discourse of the “science of scale”. Bryant M. Serre is a LEED AP ND/BD+C., WELL AP., EPt., GISP., CIFD., and holds a B.A in Environmental Studies, where he wrote a monograph on the limitations to scaling dynamics of landscape metrics with hyper-spectral imagery, suggesting that there exists a threshold between the mathematical formulas and environmental context that determine scaling trends. He is a lab alumnus of inter alia the i) Urban Water Research Group (UWRG), ii) The Great Lakes Institute of Environmental Research (GLIER), and iii) the Miner’s Canary Ecotoxicology lab; at McGill, he hopes to mobilize his diverse research background to the multidisciplinary field of landscape and computational ecology in the Cardille Lab. His past work involved creating a parcel-level stormwater calculator for tax levees in the City of Toronto; measuring how farming practices contributed to phosphorus loading in 626 sub-watersheds across southern Ontario; and most recently determining the sustainability of land-applying biosolids on terrestrial and aquatic organisms. Outside of academia, Bryant is a sculptor and cyanotypologist. He has worked as a sustainability consultant for urban development companies since 2017 on construction projects and on devising green building standards (i.e. TGS v2; City of Guelph GBS) with jurisdictions across North America. To date, he has acted as an anonymous science-writer on 17 papers, textbook chapters and he is finalizing a book on The Risk Assessment of ESOCs in Biosolids along with collaborators from Ryerson University, Rice University, the USEPA, and Environment Canada. Current Project: His thesis involves developing a data product that reflect adequate scales for analysis of landscape composition and configuration, as part of a larger project to understand "how scale is rationalized with, assigned, and assessed in Landscape Ecology". His thesis is structured into several incremental projects, with objectives of i) backgrounding the various methods in use to determine the appropriate scale for a landscape ecology inquiry; ii) to showcase the variability in scale as contingent on methodology, and iii) to contribute to the philosophical rhetoric on scale in ecology. |
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Rylan Boothman
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MSc of Natural Resource Sciences
Research Interests: machine learning, remote sensing, land use and land cover change, forest monitoring, TensorFlow, Google Earth Engine Deforestation and forest degradation account for a large portion of annual global greenhouse gas emissions and are significant sources of biodiversity loss. Better analysis of the available satellite data archives could improve decision-makers' understanding and management of human impacts on forest changes. To this end, my research focuses on applying state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to extract more information than was previously possible from remotely sensed data. Before coming to McGill, I received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Victoria. |
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Patricia Sung
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Position: Honours B.Sc. Environment:Biodiversity and Conservation, minor in GIS & Remote Sensing (Bieler School of Environment)
Research Interests: Remote sensing, GIS, Google Earth Engine (GEE), Python, R, sustainability, wildlife conservation, landscape and wildlife ecology I am currently working on my honours thesis which focuses on using Google Earth Engine to geo-spatially analyze and estimate a local specie’s biodiversity. I am also providing user feedback to the lab on another project involving Google Earth Engine. After this, I’d like to go to graduate school but will take some time off first gain some new experiences (hopefully through work and travel). I grew up in Hawaii but moved to Montréal for my studies. I’ve been lucky and had some cool opportunities while being here including with another project that I am currently working on: The Macdonald Campus Pollination Meadow. This meadow will serve as a blueprint and model for how to improve native pollinator biodiversity and connectivity for wildlife in the local area. |
Sara Pancheri
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Technician/Technologist (Geospatial Technologies, Concordia University) Research Interests: Remote Sensing, MSS Landsat, Lake Mapping, BULC (Bayesian Updating of Land-Cover), GIS From Bird Banding and Insect Collections in the field to GIS and Microbiology in the lab, Environmental & Wildlife Management technicians pride themselves in their flexibility and skill in careers related to the environment. My role in Dr. Cardille's lab is to assist his students and staff (from undergraduates to Ph.D candidates) with their research related to Computational Landscape Ecology. My current projects include MSS Imagery analysis & classification and global lake mapping. |
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Eidan Willis
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Technician (B.Sc Environment Water Environments & Ecosystems, minor in Japanese)
Research Interests: aquatic ecology, coastal ecology, remote sensing, GIS, google earth engine, BULC (bayesian updating of land cover), linear and harmonic modeling, time series analysis, forest monitoring, fire mapping I am an undergrad currently working towards a B.Sc in Environment, specializing in Water Environments & Ecosystems, and a supplementary minor in Japanese. During a gap year between high school and university, I spent a good amount of time in the Bahamas assisting researchers with their work and, in the process, developed a passion for marine ecology, tropical ecology, scuba diving, and ocean exploration. Following the completion of my degree, I hope to find a way to bridge my interest in GIS and remote sensing with my passion for the ocean and tropical environments. Under Dr. Cardille’s supervision, I am using harmonics to model the natural seasonality of vegetation at a per-pixel basis over varying temporal and spatial scales. I am also applying this work to improve the BULC (Bayesian Updating of Land Cover) algorithm’s ability to accurately interpret, classify, and differentiate wildfire burn-scars, deforestation events, vegetation regrowth, and other instances of vegetation change over time. |
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Mary Mariame Villamor
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User Interface Developer (Computer Engineering , Concordia University)
Research Interests: Front-end coding, Layout design, Algorithms, Multi-media and Internet, Web programming, Google Earth Engine, Javascript Recent Computer Science graduate from John Abbott College. Passionate about front-end programming, i.e. analyzing code and design. Currently working on releasing an application for the BULC algorithm as well as building and integrating a tool that will help researchers to analyze the results of BULC. |
Khashayar Azad
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Research Assistant (Software Engineering)
Research Interests: Data structures and algorithms, Data mining Software engineering undergrad working on exporting Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 images for 1.4 million lakes across Canada and storing the data in a cloud database server. Currently working on harvesting satellite images covering lakes in Canada using concentric circles and storing them in a database for long term access. My previous project was focused on de-speckling SAR imagery using various spatial and smoothing filters (SNIC, Terrain Correction, Gamma Map, etc.) |
