Congratulations to Dr Mirela Tulbure and the Geospatial Analysis for Environmental Change Lab at the University of New South Wales for winning a 2015 NSW Tall Poppy Science Award for their cross-disciplinary work on space-time dynamics of surface water and the ecological implications of these dynamics.
Read the announcement here.
Dr Tulbure, also an ARC DECRA fellow, is a senior lecturer in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Science. Her work uses satellite data and high-performance computing to quantify surface water dynamics, currently on the Murray-Darling River Basin. This allows her to trace patterns over decades and across large areas, which strengthens the scientific foundation of water.
Intersect provided compute time and storage for the Surface Water Dynamics project.
Dr Tulbure said: ' In my research, I reach across disciplines and integrated ecological theory with novel algorithm development for satellite image time series analysis on high performance computing provided by Intersect to quantify dynamics in surface water extent, over decades. This is really an exciting time to be doing this kind of work because there are three main things that come together:
An ever-pressing need of quantifying environmental change and drivers of change, given changes in climate and in the way we use our land.
The availability of free archives of satellite data (e.g. the longest civilian archive of earth observation data, the archive of the Landsat satellite that monitors every place on earth every 16 days at 30m res starting back in the 1970's) and new sensors being launched.
The availability of supercomputers.
We thank everybody who has supported this work: the University of New South Wales, the Australian Research Council and the Murray-Darling Basin for funding our work, Intersect Australia for compute time and storage and A/Prof David Cohen for his support'.
Read a recent article from Mirela Tulbure, Mark Broich and Robbi Bishop-Taylor on surface water network structure, landscape resistance to movement and flooding vital for maintaining ecological connectivity across Australia’s largest river basin here.