Achievement

Research in the Galapagos Islands has linked social, natural, spatial, and computational sciences in the study of human-environment interactions. On-going and completed studies fuse the social, terrestrial, and marine subsystems in a fragile and special environment, one that has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and boasts the world renowned Galapagos National Park and Marine Research. Pilot studies are underway in population, health, and environment and their interactions. A key science accomplishment was the development of landscape mapping approaches applied to mangrove forests that involved the fusion of multi-resolution satellite imagery to assess the fringing mangrove forest patches on Isabela Island in the Galapagos Archipelago, and the development of a hybrid method for characterizing topography associated with species mapping of mangrove forest.