Dr. Edward Mitchard

Research interests:

I study ways in which we can use satellite data to monitor woody cover and biomass from space, especially in the forests, savannas and woodlands of Africa. Tropical forests, savannas and woodlands support over 1.4 billion of the world’s people, with many of them living in poverty. They also supply a great service to the rest of the world, as apart from containing over 80 % of the world’s biodiversity they moderate and modulate our climate, protecting water resources and absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. I hope that my research can help prevent deforestation and degradation of these valuable resources by enabling the development of viable alternative livelihoods for those people that live there.

In my PhD (completed summer 2011) I did fieldwork and projects in Cameroon, Uganda and South Africa, and was also involved in projects in Gabon and Mozambique. My PhD was funded by Gatsby Plants, and my principle supervisor was Dr Patrick Meir, with second supervisors Sassan Saatchi (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Iain Woodhouse (University of Edinburgh) and France Gerard (CEH Wallingford).

After my PhD I obtained a Research Fellowship from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), funding me to research new methods for using satellite data to monitor forests, again mostly in Africa, and to communicate these results to projects and governments. My research followed a number of different threads all relating to the satellite remote sensing of Africa’s forests, woodlands and savannas, and also expanded to include pantropical biomass mapping and comparing such pantropical maps. I am now a Chancellor’s Fellow, still at the University of Edinburgh, and manage a group of postdocs and PhD students. My group is funded by NERC, the UK Space Agency, the European Space Agency, and the US Forest Service.

Research themes (Abridged):

1. I study the response of satellite radar data to aboveground biomass. I have published papers on using the ALOS PALSAR and JERS-1 satellites to monitor biomass and biomass change in Cameroon, Uganda and Mozambique.

2. I also look at using optical satellite data for studying landcover change as well as woody cover and biomass mapping.

3. I am interested in working with end-users to discover the most useful and cost-effective ways satellite data can be used.

4. The above are all at a local to regional scale. However, I am also interested in scaling up these methodologies, and I work on mapping aboveground biomass at a continental and pantropical scale.

I also have some other projects/areas of interest, including:

– I have done a number of field campaigns in Africa to produce biomass data for the calibration and validation of remote sensing data. I am interested in refining and optimising field methodologies to enable the highest quality data to be collected in minimum time. In combination with my supervisors I have advised various different groups on field methodologies and equipment. I am also interested in developing field methodologies that can be used by local communities (linking to 3 above)

– I have spent about 6 months of my PhD based in Los Angeles, at both the Center for Tropical Research at UCLA, and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. At UCLA I have become involved in some other projects, covering topics such as the spatial modelling of biodiversity and the importance of transition zones for speciation.