My objective is to be recognized nationally and internationally for my scholarship – both for its rigor and ability to improve society through a better understanding of environmental processes.  My research interests center on the integration of GIS and remote sensing techniques with surface water quality and other environmental models, biogeography, and applied physical geography.  I have taken initial steps to develop both an independent and collaborative research program that revolves around the themes of environmental assessment, biosecurity, and biogeography.  A strong effort over the next five years will be to establish a GIS Center of Excellence for Biosecurity at Kansas State University to facilitate domestic research in animal and plant diseases and international efforts examining ecological aspects of human disease.

To date, my work in environmental assessment has focused on expanding my dissertation research on RADAR estimates of near-surface soil moisture and attempting to better understand the impact of natural and anthropogenic activities on surface water quality and landscape properties, especially as those activities relate to vegetation and soil erosion.  After joining the K-State faculty in 2000 as a visiting faculty member in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, I published an award-nominated paper based upon my dissertation work in Transactions of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers, the flagship journal of the discipline. 

As a key collaborator on a watershed assessment project in central Kansas funded by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, my efforts were instrumental in augmenting traditional watershed water quality modeling efforts with GIS procedures, to speed analysis and better visualize results, and remote sensing techniques to improve parameterization of key model inputs such as landcover type and standing vegetative biomass.  Results of this work were published in the Journal of Environmental Hydrology and as a chapter in the book, World Minds:  Geographical Perspectives on 100 Problems. 

A current grant four-year grant ending in 2007 from the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) is allowing me to further explore this topic by incorporating non-microwave data, in the form of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) land surface temperature and vegetation index products, to produce spatial estimates of soil moisture at Fort Riley, Kansas.  Additional evidence of my remote sensing research is illustrated by a manuscript, resulting from the NASA-EPSCoR funded HYSPIRE project, which recently appeared in International Journal of Remote Sensing.

An emphasis of my current biogeography scholarship has been modeling the distributions (both potential and actual) of invasive insects and evaluating their impact on agroecosystems.  I have recently finished leading a multidisciplinary project with K-State entomologists examining the North American distribution and rate of spread for an exotic soybean aphid.  With funding from the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), we incorporated extension entomologist field data with GIS and environmental niche models to accurately predict aphid locations for future growing seasons. 

Given the success of the aphid research, I turned my attention to implementing dynamic mapping, monitoring, and modeling capabilities for the USDA-funded Great Plains Plant Diagnostic Network (GPDN) to assist in plant disease risk management.  I have initiated a similar effort in the area of animal disease monitoring through collaboration with investigators of the joint K-State/Sandia National Laboratory Remote Syndrome Validation Project (RSVP).  Additional applied research in this area includes GIS application development and creation of an agriculture biosecurity GIS data model.

An important aspect underlying of all of this work is the analysis of appropriate GIS and remote sensing techniques and data that will facilitate my broader research program. In addition to the applied aspect of soil moisture predictions currently underway at Fort Riley, I am also overseeing the formal comparison of MODIS NDVI and Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) data over “natural” and human-disturbed landscapes and development of a GIS-based erosion model based upon kinematic wave theory that identifies the location where sheet flow transitions to concentrated flow.