BSCN – Urban Ecosystems Lab of Forestry Resources Management, Vancouver BC
I worked with Urban Ecosystem Lab of FRM this spring as a data analyst. My supervisor is a PhD candidate working on how to classify city trees based on their ecohydrological features in Montgomery County, Maryland. The research is completely remote sensing based. I have been working with LiDAR data using LasTools, and further analyze data using ArcMap, R, Python and Excel. During the process I was involved in solving little problems for the research, which satisfied my interest of research work. Although sitting in front of a computer and dealing with large amount of data can be exhausting, I enjoyed seeing any little progress we made. My skills of GIS and programming have for sure improved significantly with my supervisor’s help. This job allowed me to understand the difference between urban forestry and traditional forest management, as well as the importance of GIS in urban forest practice. I believe that there is still a lot to explore in the field of urban forestry, and this could be where my future interest lies.
