Background, Research Interests, and Current Projects:
Tom grew up in Juneau, Alaska. During and after receiving his B.S. in Geography/Environmental Studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks he worked on a variety of field-based research projects in the boreal forest of Alaska and Siberia. In 2002 Tom took a job with the Bureau of Land Management in Alaska where he conducted fieldwork and used GIS to support two different resource management plans: the East Alaska RMP and the Kobuk-Seward Peninsula RMP. Admission into the master's program in the Department of Geography at the University of Nevada Reno brought Tom to Reno in 2005. His thesis is a quantitative comparison of the morphology of natural landforms and artificial landforms generated from large-scale mining.
Currently, Tom is working as a spatial analyst in the Landscape Ecology Lab where he provides GIS, remote sensing, and spatial modeling support for the Walker Basin project. The project examines the ecological implications of land use and land cover changes that would result from the purchase of water rights or the conversion of land to alternative agriculture. Current research for the Walker Basin project includes historical reconstruction of vegetation using the General Land Office survey notes and other historical data sources in order to examine land use changes over time and to provide pre-settlement baseline data. Other Walker Basin research examines the relationship between vegetation communities and environmental variables, many of which are derived from high-resolution LiDAR imagery. Tom is also involved in helping the National Park Service develop a monitoring protocol for desert springs in Death Valley National Park using a remote sensing approach. In collaboration with Jian Yang Tom is working to develop GIS tools that will optimize the selection of control sites for landscape experiments. |
