Contact
Biography
I am part of the second EPSRC CDT Geospatial systems cohort based in Nottingham. I work inter-disciplinarily between the Nottingham Geospatial Institute, in the faculty of Engineering, and the School of Geography. This is a result of my academic background with a Physical Geography BSc (Hons) and MSc by research in fluvial geomorphology both at the University of Nottingham. Through the CDT, I added a Masters in Geospatial Data Science where I focused on cloud computing, remote sensing, and river temperature. This background has been fundamental to the work I now do using Earth Observation, primarily to look holistically at river systems.
Making scientific insights operational to end users is the focus of my PhD thesis. In doing so we make the most of available satellite imagery to build components that would be required in a digital twin of a river system. A RiverTwin! The first work package focused on overcoming the radiometric limitations of PlanetScope's CubeSat constellation using artificial intelligence to automate the development of robust water masks. The project is published in Remote Sensing of Environment and available through my GitHub should you wish to use it. From there we looked at river islands in the Amazon Basin and how their exposure could be assessed with daily imagery to give insights into droughts. This work, to our knowledge, was the most PlanetScope images (2500) used in a single riverine study, it has been submitted to a scientific journal and is currently under review. Finally, we are currently working on using a constellation of satellite constellations to build a semi-automated framework to extract accurate satellite derived river surface temperature as often as possible.
As part of the PhD, I have had the opportunity to carry out research at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) in Quebec, Canada under the 2023 Globalink, Mitacs internship. Here I worked on satellite gauged river discharge and worked with the connections I made there in the field on a variety of projects. I have also been able to present my CDT Research at conferences such as the RSPSOC Earth Observation Conference in the UK, the Wavelength conference in the UK (Where I won best presentation in 2023), a Canadian Space Agency session at the CWRA conference in Halifax, Canada, the Australia and New Zealand Geomorphology Group conference in Gisbourne, NZ, and then renew the connections with colleagues in Canada, at the Ecohydraulics Conference in Quebec. The PhD has also given me the opportunity to chair the Wavelength Conference for 2025!I plan to finish my PhD in December this year and am interested to hear about any opportunities in the academic, industrial, or public sector, so feel free to get in touch. I will be at the UKEO conference in September and AGU in December, so if you see me there, please say hello!
Expertise Summary
Whilst working on the PhD, I have carried out a multitude of additional research projects including working on WWF reports for the Slavery from Space Project in the UoN Rights Lab. Here we used satellites to look at environmental indicators such as inter-cropping in Palm Oil and illegal shrimp farms in Bangladesh as indicators of modern slavery. I have also helped provide indicators of recover for a post-Hurricane disaster management team working in the Bahamas. I have lead-authored a paper looking into permafrost degradation, in northern Sweden, using InSAR as part of an international team of researchers. Finally, I have acted as the curator of the Stage Zero River Restoration website with NOAA and the USFS. This site allows keeps track of publications and news reports of the Stage Zero River Restoration technique and has an interactive map where users can add restoration sites as they are carried out.