Amy Hudson Pickens
Assistant Research Professor
Thesis Title:
Dr. Pickens is responsible for annual updates of her global surface water map (Pickens et al., 2020). Amy has also developed a method for mapping global seasonal dynamics of inland open water and ice (Pickens et al., 2022). At the same time, she has been maintaining, updating and further developing operational near-real-time forest alerts (Hansen et al., 2016). Specifically, she has rebuild the original Landsat-based model and expanded it to the entire pan-tropical region, and created a new model for the Amazon Basin based on Sentinel-2 data. Both Amy’s forest alert products are available as a part of the integrated forest alert product on the Global Forest Watch portal.
Most recently Dr. Pickens has been leading the production of the new near-real-time vegetation disturbance alert (DIST-alert) product based on the Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) data, which is a part of the NASA JPL’s Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis (OPERA) project. The provisional version of the dataset is available from the USGS LP DAAC, with the publication in preparation.
