Elvis Herrera is an undergraduate majoring in GIS with a specific interest in Remote Sensing as well as incorporating computer programming into GIS. Elvis is currently working on accurate assessing forest cover loss on Rapid Eye sample images and comparing them to Classified Landsat 7 images.

My interest is to distinguish different factors that caused forest loss at global scale, such as fire, clear cutting, disease, storms and others.  Meanwhile, I have interest in mapping global urbanization progress.

I am particularly interested in utilizing remotely sensed data and geo-spatial modeling to support conversation projects. My current work is in support of a collaborative project with the Jane Goodall Institute entitled "Monitoring and Forecasting Chimpanzee Habitat Health in Africa to Inform Conservation Actions, Strategies and Measure Success". My contribution to this project involves the creation of a range wide chimpanzee habitat suitability model driven by remotely sensed datasets and the simulation of future deforestation scenarios.

CARPE is USAID’s Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (carpe.umd.edu) which began in 1995. Alice has been involved directly with CARPE since 2004, initially assembling and processing Landsat data and now managing the University of Maryland’s CARPE funded activities.

Graduated from the Moscow State Forest University in 2005. After graduating, he worked for Russian Forest Health Center, where he focused on remote sensing of natural forest disturbance.    Now Alexander's research is focused on the global and regional forest cover dynamic assessment and Landsat based near real-time forest monitoring.

Viviana has a bachelor's degree in Environmental Science and has earned her PhD in Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland. She is interested in using remote sensing to research large scale land cover change and its drivers, particularly in the context of tropical deforestation. 

Research interests include crop specific agricultural mapping, area estimates, production estimates and productivity estimates. Current dissertation focuses on the advancement of  methods for estimating cropland area, with a prototype for soybean national estimates in Argentina, Brazil and the United States.

I joined the GLAD lab in 2014 where I started my dissertation research on detecting and characterizing the dynamics of global bare ground change. It didn’t take much time that I fell in love with this group given the inspiring advice and practical support I received and the friendly environment and productive collaborations in the group. My research interests are land cover and land use change, remote sensing, urbanization, forestry and terrestrial carbon sequestration.

Yolande is interested in large scale hydrological modeling of the Congo Basin using remote sensed data. She came in the US in from the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a Fulbright scholar to pursue a Master in Water and Wetland Resource completed at SUNY/ESF (2007). In 2012, she joined the Geographical Sciences Department at the University of Maryland  to pursue her PhD Program under Professor Matthew C. Hansen, a program she started at the Geospatial Science & Engineering at the Geographic Information Science Center of Excellence (GIScCE) at South Dakota State University.

Giuseppe is investigating how shifting cultivation in the Democratic Republic of Congo interacts with forest and impacts the environment and how it is included in alternative sustainable development pathways which target not only economic development but the protection of the environment, biodiversity and future resource use. The role that traditional livelihood farming has to play within development pathways  is of paramount importance in the planning, management and development of land.