Students success on show

New postgraduate theses are now available on the CRC website, with research done on temperature estimation, biomass, data sets and forest litter.

Dr Bryan Hally completed his PhD with RMIT University in Melbourne and the University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands as part of a dual badged program. His thesis research titled Methods for background temperature estimation in the context of active fire detection work looked at the methods by which fires are discovered in remote sensing imagery from satellites, focusing on the estimation of background temperatures and improvements to estimation using multi-temporal techniques.

Bryan is currently working within the Geospatial Sciences department at RMIT University where he is a researcher, assisting in forest fuel attribution and forest structure projects. Bryan’s thesis is available here.

Remote sensing of tree structure and biomass in north Australian mesic savanna is the title of Dr Grigorijs Goldberg’s PhD thesis that was recently accepted by Charles Darwin University. Grigorijs’ research developed a new approach for measuring biomass/carbon stocks in savanna vegetation which offers insight into the factors causing the poor dense image matching by high-resolution stereo satellites. The methodologies developed by his research can be applied to large areas of savanna country across northern Australia.

Grigorijs is now working as a remote sensing expert at Latvia’s Geospatial Agency and his thesis is available here.

Associate student Dr Mona Ziaeyan Bahri’s PhD thesis, accepted by the University of New South Wales, focused on the subject of time series analysis and its application to environmental data sets relating to natural hazards. The sensitivity of the empirical mode decomposition and its application on environmental data uses empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to formulate a better understanding of the data analysis tool and its application to temperature, sea level and forest fire danger rating.

Mona’s PhD thesis is available here.

Angela Gormley’s Masters research focused on whether prescribed burning alters all the components of the fuel load in typical vegetation types in the Sydney Basin, and whether plants that are characteristic of different vegetation types in the Sydney Basin differ in their leaf morphology and flammability traits. Her thesis, recently accepted by the University of Sydney, titled Effects of Sydney coastal dry sclerophyll forest litter on fuels and fire behaviour in Hornsby Shire used empirical data to characterise the physical and chemical attributes of litter, a component of forest and woodland fuels that is particularly important for propagation of fire.

Angela’s thesis is available here.