University of Calgary

Greg McDermid

  • Professor

Research Interests:

I am a geospatial scientist whose research activities revolve around the application of remote sensing and other geospatial technolgies to environmental monitoring and ecology. I am involved in a wide variety of interdisciplinary research collaborations in the fields of wildlife ecology, biodiversity assessment, ecological monitoring, plant-phenology assessment, and vegetation mapping. I'm interested in a broad range of remote sensing and other GIScience pursuits, including digital image processing, spatial analysis, environmental modelling, and data fusion/integration.

Biography:

I joined the department in January, 2005 and was promoted to Associate Professor in April, 2011. I've studied at the University of Calgary (B.Sc., 1991; M.Sc. 1993) and the University of Waterloo (Ph.D., 2005) in areas of physical geography, GIS, and environmental remote sensing. Prior to this current academic gig, I founded and managed an Internet publishing and consulting company out of Fort Collins, Colorado from 1994 to 2001.

Graduate Student Alumni

2010

Julia Linke, PhD (currently a PostDoc in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto) - Development and application of a framework for flexible and reliable landscape monitoring: changes in the Alberta foothills and the impact on grizzly bear habitat.

Erin Latham, MGIS (currently a PhD student in the Department of Geography, University of Victoria) - Changes in bighorn sheep habitat of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

2009

Aleksandra Sobol, MGIS (currently with Freestone Consulting) - The impact of sampling intensity and failed GPS acquisitions on animal home-range estimation.

2008

Ben Curry, MGIS - A comparison of relative and absolute change detection for measuring forest disturbance.

Shadan Sanii, MGIS (currently with Stantec) - Assessing the effect of point density and terrain complexity of LiDAR-derived DEMs in multiple resolutions.

Jennifer Hird, MSc (currently with the Foothills Facility for Remote Sensing and GIScience) - Noise reduction for time series of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI): an empirical comarison of selected techniques.

2007

Iain Smith, MGIS (currently with Timberline Natural Resources Group) - Mapping the distribution of whitebark pine in Waterton Lakes National Park using logistic regression and classification tree analysis.

Sarah Miall, MGIS (currently with Suncor Energy) - Knowledge formulation with H-resolution satellite imagery: object-oriented versis pixel-based approaches.

Adam McLane. MGIS (currently a PhD student at the University of Calgary) - Processing discrete-return profiling LiDAR data to estimate canopy closure for the purpose of grizzly bear management in northern Alberta.

Katie Yalte, MGIS (currently with the Foothills Research Institute) - Relative change detection: an overlooked advantage.

2006

Prasanna Man Shrestha, MGIS (currently with Tera Environmental Consutants) - Comparison of ordinary-least-squares regression, spatial autoregression, and geographically-weighted regression for modeling forest structural attributes using a geographical information system/remote sensing approach.

Dan Austin, MGIS (currently with Summit Environmental Consultants) - Object-oriented processing and high-spatial-resolution imagery: Comparison of pixel- and object-based image classification of an IKONOS-2 image centered around Barrier Lake, Alberta.

Publications

Journal Article

Journal Articles - Peer Reviewed

Research Groups

  • Ecosystem Analysis for the Crown of the Continent
  • Grizzly Bear Research Program
  • Remote Sensing and Biodiversity Monitoring
  • The Ecology of Endangered Whitebark and Limber Pines

Curriculum Vitae

Degrees

Students

Powered by UNITIS. More features.