Spaceborne and airborne remote sensing allows a synoptic view of large areas of the Earth’s surface in a cost effective way. It has been successfully applied to mineral exploration, where metals in the substrate affect the spectral response of the vegetation growing on chemical anomalies. In order to test this technique in Puerto Rico, Johannes…
Variations of total suspended sediment (TSS) in Mayagüez Bay and their relationship with inland soil erosion rates were the main objectives of the research conducted by Vilmaliz Rodriguez. In December 8, 2009, she presented the results of her work and successfully defended her thesis. Several analyses were developed using in situ remote sensing reflectance, backscattering,…
Remotely estimation of nutrients concentration in the water column has been a very difficult task, especially in the tropics. However, that did not stop the doctoral student of civil engineering, Luis Campos, to conduct a research in this field. Actually he successfully defended the dissertation on December 4, 2009. The project was entitled “Identifying Total…
Puerto Mosquito Bay (in Vieques) and La Parguera Bay (in Lajas) are two of the most important bioluminescence bays in the World. However, even when Puerto Rico has these two marvelous bays there had never been a symposium dedicated to this topic in the island. This is why the Vieques Conservation and Historical Trust hold…
During August 18 and 19 of 2009 Vilmaliz Rodríguez visited College University of New York to participate in the Sixth Annual NOAA/NESDIS/STAR CoRP Symposium. This event was focused on presenting new approaches and methods to maximize the retrieving of information from remote sensing data. Presentations consisted in thirty orals and thirty three posters of several…
The graduate student Yadira Soto Viruet participated in a summer internship with the US Geological Survey in Reston, VA. She worked for the Minerals Information Team (MIT) that annually reports on the minerals facilities of more than 180 countries. MIT collects and analyze information on mineral facilities showing the production of metals, industrial minerals and…
The Center for Hemispherical Cooperation in Research and Education in Engineering and Applied Science (CoHemis) celebrated its fourth consecutive summer camp during July 13-19 of 2009. This year main topic was “Teaching Actively and Learning as a Team” and incorporated for the first time a workshop of remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS). This…
As in the last summer (2008), the graduate student Natlee Hernandez worked as part of the Eastern Geographic Science Center under the supervision of Dr. John Jones, a geographer of the U.S. Geological Survey. This was her second internship at the USGS and she worked as physical science tech. The project was about the fire…
The ninety-fifth graduation of University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez (UPRM) represented the ceremony with the highest number of doctoral degrees that has been conferred in that institution. Twenty-four students received their Ph.D. on June 12 of 2009. UPRM offers this degree since 1983 and it has been increasing its doctoral programs through time. This…
Estimation of suspended sediments using ocean color sensors, like MODIS, has been a major goal in our research of Mayaguez Bay, at western Puerto Rico. A large effort by Vilmaliz Rodriguez, master student of the GERS Lab, is finally giving good results toward that objective. She has tried several approaches in order to use MODIS…