CRC student wins best paper award

Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC PhD student Yang Chen has been awarded the 2016 best student paper in the category of Earth Resources and Environmental Remote Sensing/GIS Applications by the SPIE Remote Sensing.

Yang's paper titled 'Estimation of forest surface fuel load using airborne LiDAR data'  was presented at the SPIE Remote Sensing 2016 conference and published in the conference proceedings. SPIE is the international society for optics and phototonics, advancing an interdisciplinary approach to the science and application of light. As a committed supporter of excellence in student research, SPIE supports Best Student Paper Awards at SPIE conferences across the globe. The awards are designed to encourage and acknowledge excellence in oral and poster student paper presentations. View Yang's paper here.

Yang has also been awarded the Merit Overseas Student prize for 2016, which is funded by the China Scholarship Council. The prize was awarded by the Chinese government for encouraging outstanding non-Chinese government funded Chinese PhD students abroad across all disciplines. Yang's award was for geography, with a prize of $6,000 USD. 

Yang is completing her PhD with Monash University focusing on modelling forest fuel temporal change using LiDAR. The study is using LiDAR to measure landscape-scale forest fuels in order to generate a time effective, feasible and objective method for forest fuel hazard assessment.