After spending 6 months in the Department of Geography, Emilio Chuvieco is returning to his home university, Alcalá (Spain). His research here focused on remote sensing and fires, in close collaboration with Prof. Chris Justice and his group, as well as Prof. Eric Kasischke. Emilio has developed a burned land mapping series of Canadian boreal forest, using a 23 years series of AVHRR provided by the CCRS. The study area includes 1.6 million sq km study site. Current efforts include the relation of temporal trends in burned area with climatic records, as well as the regeneration patterns for different fire years. As a result of this project, one paper has already been sent to Remote Sensing of Environment and another one is in preparation.

The second project has dealt with defining fire regimes at global scale from MODIS active fire data, and finding significant relations with human and eco-climatic variables. The project was developed at a 0.5 x 0.5º resolution, and included the use of GIS to generate the input variables. A paper will be soon submitted to Journal of Applied Ecology with the first results of this project. Additionally, an extension of this work will analyze the spatial variation of the fire and human factors using Geographically Weighted Regression.

In addition to these projects, Dr. Chuvieco participated in the Department Seminar Series at the University of Maryland and University of Arizona, where he spent three weeks working with Prof. Alfredo Huete on a remote sensing textbook.