GESTAR II Seminar Series with Dr. Matthew Fagan (UMBC, Dept. of GES)

Join us for a virtual seminar by Dr. Matthew Fagan, Associate Professor, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His talk is titled "Pushing the Pixels: How remote sensing overestimates forest edge effects." 

Date and Time: Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 2:45PM EST
Online: Join us via Teams.  

Abstract:
"Most forests lie within 1 km of an edge, where edge effects can alter carbon storage, temperature regulation, and biodiversity. Yet remote sensing is prone to systematically overestimating these effects. Four persistent methodological and definitional issues drive this bias: spatial scale, forest definition, forest type, and space-for-time substitution. Surveying the recent literature, I show how each has likely inflated measured edge effects in urban, riparian, and upland forests, and I argue for a more local, temporally grounded approach to edge analysis. More broadly, this work bears on a general challenge in remote sensing: analyzing fine-scale features with coarse thermal and ecophysiological data, like that derived from VIIRS and MODIS."

Biography:
Dr. Matthew Fagan is an associate professor at UMBC and a conservation ecologist and geographer whose work focuses on landscape degradation and recovery. His research combines remote sensing with field data to understand how forests and tree plantations change, and what that means for carbon, biodiversity, and restoration.

For more information on the GESTAR II Seminar Series, click here.