Dr Jan Verbesselt: spatio-temporal monitoring of forest health

Dr Jan Verbesselt, a posdoctoral research fellow with the CSIRO Remote Sensing team, uses satellite imagery to assess forest health.

• 2 September 2008 | Updated 14 October 2011

Overview

• Current activities
• Background
• Academic qualifications
• Achievements

Current activities

Dr Jan Verbesselt's research focuses on spatio-temporal analysis of high temporal resolution satellite images (including, Quickbird, Hyperion, Landsat and MODIS) to monitor forest health dynamics such as tree defoliation and discolouration.

Over the next three years, Dr Verbesselt will be taking a lead role in a Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Forestry project on forest condition monitoring.

Dr Verbesselt's main research objective within the CRC is to develop a monitoring system to assess and deliver forest health information to plantation growers using a time-series of MODIS satellite images. These images provide image data for all of Australia every day since 2000. 

To achieve this, Dr Verbesselt is using a MySQL database and R environment for spatio-temporal modelling and statistical analysis.

Dr Verbesselt is looking forward to exchanging experiences in using spatial databases (e.g. Oracle Spatial and PostGIS), open source geographic information system (GIS) and R programming language with his new Australian colleagues.

Background

Dr Verbesselt completed a bioengineering degree at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and a joint Masters of Science in earth observation at Purdue University, Indiana, USA.

He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, investigating the use of high temporal resolution remote sensing to monitor fire risk dynamics (example, vegetation water content) to optimise fire risk assessment in South African savannas and forest plantations.

Given the large areas affected by savanna and forest fires globally, information on the spatial and temporal variation of vegetation dynamics is of critical importance. Satellite data provides the most suitable means of obtaining such information.

SPOT VEGETATION (SPOT VGT) satellite data (one km spatial resolution) were acquired for South Africa from 1998 to 2003 to monitor vegetation characteristics related to fire risk dynamics.

Dr Verbesselt used this data set as the framework of his doctoral research because:

• the satellite made large-area and high-frequency monitoring possible
• the data have high potential for expressing canopy reflectance and global vegetation monitoring
• specific satellite indices related to vegetation water content can be derived.

Academic qualifications

Dr Verbesselt has been awarded a:

• Bachelor of Biological Engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1997
• Masters of Science in Engineering in Agriculture also from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2000
• Masters of Science in Earth Observation, from the Purdue University, USA, 2002
• Doctor of Philosophy in Applied Biological Science (Remote Sensing) from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2006.

Achievements

Dr Verbesselt is a reviewer for the following journals and foundations:

• Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
• Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing
• Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
• Remote Sensing of Environment
• The European Science Foundation.

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