Full Name:
Elvis Herrera
Please provide a short summary of yourself by answering the questions below.
Background: Please provide a short summary of yourself including the following information:
1) What major(s), minors, and/or certificates you are working on at UMD?
I am senior majoring in GIS.
2) What are your interests within your program(s)?
I am interested in the programming
side of GIS. Computer programming allows to use your creativity and problem
solving skill and it has been an important tool to obtain in GIS.
I also have an interest in remote
sensing due to the fact that there is so much data you can collect by using
electromagnetic radiation on images as well as seeing how land has changed over
time.
3) What previous jobs, internships, and volunteer experience have you had?
This past summer, I have
participated the UMD BSOS Summer Research Initiative program in which give
undergrads, who are planning to pursue a Masters/Ph.D., the opportunity to work
on a project and be mentored by UMD researchers of their major.
4) Where you are from (optional)?
Internship:
1) Where you are interning?
UMD department of Geographical
Science working under Dr. Matthew Hansen’s team
2) What are your internship responsibilities?
Doing supervised classification
training for the project describe below.
I am also classifying forest cover
loss on RapidEye sample images and comparing them to landsat images. What we
are looking for is to see what RapidEye images are visible in terms of forest
cover loss that Landsat does not identify. After this process, we will perform
a quality assessment for both products.
3) What project(s) are you working on or contributing to?
The IPCC have created guidelines for
countries to follow to monitor carbon stocks and emissions of greenhouse gases
associated with Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry activities. Dr. Matthew
Hansen’s team were ask by, the Ministry of Agriculture of Peru, to classify
their country based on the IPCC categorize land areas into 6 classes: forest
land, cropland, grassland, wetlands, settlement, and other land such as bare
soil, rock, and ice. We classified these land areas using pre-processed Landsat
7 satellite image mosaics at 30 meter pixel resolution from 2010 to 2013,
including data from the newly launched Landsat 8 sensor. The method used in
this project employed a decision tree classification algorithm and a comparison
to the results of the Hansen et al. (2013) global forest cover change map for
quality assessment.
4) How is the internship experience relevant to your studies in Geographical Sciences?
I am using remote sensing in my
current job.
5) What are your career goals after your graduate?
After graduation, I plan on
attending graduate school. My goal is to continue learning and contributing in
the field of GIS and remote sensing.