The Remote Sensing Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) has announced the winners of the annual Student Honors Paper Competition. Rowan Converse, first year doctoral student in Geography and lab manager of ASPIRE, placed second with her master’s thesis work, “MESMA for Monitoring Semiarid Grass- and Shrubland in New Mexico.”

The Student Honors Paper Competition highlights innovative student research on GIS and remote sensing concepts, theories, methods, and applications, and is open to undergraduate and graduate students. Entrants must submit a paper in the first round of judging; finalists from the first round present their work at the AAG Annual Meeting in the second. The top three entrants receive a cash prize and a publication voucher to the journal Remote Sensing.

Rowan's work was completed as part of a Sevilleta Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Graduate Research Fellowship, and focused on developing methods to monitor vegetation dynamics in desert environments using satellite imagery. 

Congratulations, Rowan!