Dr. Julia Linke (above, at left) won the 2010 Best PhD Thesis Award from the Canadian Remote Sensing Society (CRSS). This is a national award, which Julia accepted on June 15, 2011 at the CRSS Annual Awards Banquet in Sherbrooke, Quebec.
Julia's thesis was entitiled Development and Application of a Framework for Flexible and Reliable Landscape Monitoring: Changes in the Alberta Foothills and the Impact on Grizzly Bear Habitat. The research, which was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, Alberta Innovates Technology Futures, and a series of industrial sponsors, focused on the development and application of strategies for tracking landscape changes using satellite remote sensing technologies within a geographic information system. The work solved a number of complex issues, including the elimination of errors caused by system noise, and the accommodation of various geographic data models used in landscape representation. In her final chapter, Dr. Linke used her methods to track anthropogenic disturbances and assess their impacts on grizzly bears within the multi-use foothills landscape of Alberta. The work constitutes one of the first demonstrations of this type of landscape-monitoring activity in the field of wildlife ecology. The detailed multi-temporal disturbance inventory Julia created has allowed researchers to document the rapid changes occurring within this region, and facilitated a first-time analysis on the impacts of the various disturbance processes on Alberta’s threatened grizzly bear population.
In the course of her PhD, Julia published six peer-reviewed journal articles. Three of these manuscripts appear as chapters in her paper-based thesis: A fourth manuscript (Chapter 5) will be submitted in the fall to the scientific journal Remote Sensing of Environment. The three relevant publications arising from Dr. Linke's thesis (Chapters 2, 3, and 4) are listed below:
- Linke, J., G.J. McDermid, A.D. Pape, A.J. McLane, D.N. Laskin, M. Hall-Beyer, and S.E. Franklin, 2009: The influence of patch delineation mismatches on multi-temporal landscape pattern analysis. Landscape Ecology, 24(2): 157-170, doi:10.1007/s10980-008-9290-z.
- Linke, J. and G. J. McDermid, 2010: A conceptual model for multi-temporal landscape monitoring in an object-based environment. Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, doi: 10.1109/JSTARS.2010.2045881.
- Linke, J., G.J. McDermid, D.N. Laskin, A.J. McLane, A.D. Pape, J. Cranston, M. Hall-Beyer, and S.E. Franklin, 2009: A disturbance-inventory framework for flexible and reliable landscape monitoring. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 75(8): 981-996.
Dr. Linke's work has been widely praised over the past year. In addiation to the CRSS award, Julia won research and presentation awards from the Department of Geography, University of Calgary; presented her work at three national/international scientific conferences; and received outstanding feedback and recognition from her peers. Her paper “A disturbance-inventory framework for flexible and reliable landscape monitoring” (Linke et al. 2009; Chapter 3) was the third-place recipient of the 2010 ERDAS Award for Best Scientific Paper in Remote Sensing: an award that she received at the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing conference in San Diego last spring. In the spring of 2009, Dr. Linke presented her work at the MultiTemp conference in Connecticut, and was approached by Remote Sensing of Environment Editor-in-Chief Marvin Bauer, who complimented her by calling her research amongst the most innovative pieces of work that he had seen in years. Strong praise indeed!
Julia's thesis was supervised by Dr. Greg McDermid. Supervisory committee members were Dr. Steven Franklin (Trent University), Dr. Marie-Josee Fortin (University of Toronto), and Dr. Mryka Hall-Beyer (University of Calgary). The research was part of the Foothills Research Institute Grizzly Bear Research Program's recenlty completed NSERC Collaborative Research and Development project Understanding and Tracking Landscape Change and Animal Health for Effective Management and Conservation of Species at Risk.
Dr. Linke is currently on maternity leave, and has accepted an NSERC Post-Doctoral appointment at the University of Toronto under Marie-Josee Fortin starting in September of 2011. Congratulations, Julia!
