Dr. Mausel and Dr. Moran in the Remote Sensing Lab at ISU.

Numerous research projects are in progress for class work, grant work, and individual research projects.  Over fifty students are currently involved with our GIS lab, some of which are involved in multiple projects.  Here are some examples of the projects currently being developed.

The Amazon Project
"Human and Physical Dimensions of Land Use/Land Cover Change in Amazonia: Forest Regeneration and Landscape Structure". This is a three year NASA grant totaling. Dr. Emilio Moran from Indiana University is project PI/PA. Paul Mausel is co-PI in charge of remote sensing/GIS elements of research with a subcontract to ISU. 

The IDEM (Indiana Department of Environmental Management) watershed delineation project
The purpose of this project is to develop a GIS spatial database of watershed variables for water systems throughout Indiana that provide community drinking water from surface water intakes.  This database will be utilized for monitoring  EPA regulated pollution sources from the FINES database and various other watershed management applications.  All 46 surface water intakes in Indiana were located by GPS, entered into our database, and combined with various watershed data to establish a complete GIS for each watershed.  The image below represents a sample layout for the Jasper watershed.
 

The Ohio Valley Ecosystem GAP Migratory Bird Resource Priority GAP Metaproject (ORVE) was created in an effort to identify areas of importance to species of migratory birds.  The target bird species in this project are mainly songbirds that winter in South America or Latin America and breed or inhabit the Ohio River Watershed during the spring and summer.  The other organizations involved, Partners in Flight and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, feel that these species are in particular danger due to stress caused by fragmentation and loss of habitat in both their wintering grounds and their spring and summer ranges.  Loss of habitat and fragmentation have a number of effects upon a species and many of these are currently being studied.  The purpose of the project is to identify areas in the Ohio River Valley that are of particular importance to these species of birds and present the information in an ArcView GIS project.  This image gives some landcover boundary data for the entire area being studied.