Research

Research

CEARS was established in 1997 as a NASA center of excellence in applications of remote sensing to regional and global integrated environmental assessments. With cores faculty in both the Geography and Forestry departments, it is Virginia Tech’s focal point for interdisciplinary research, instruction, and outreach focused on remote sensing applications.  Center researchers have extensive expertise with a wide variety of data types (i.e., active and passive microwave, multispectral, hyperspectral, lidar, and aerial photographs) and application areas, including:

• Forest Inventory and Silviculture
• Carbon Monitoring, Modeling, and Management
• Ecophysiology
• Ecosystem Services
• Vegetation Phenology and Landuse Change
• Wetland Ecosystems
• Mineland Restoration Ecology
• High Performance Computing and Algorithm Development