Vogel and Abecassis win NESDIS Collaboration Awards
CISESS Scientists Melanie Abecassis and Ronald Vogel received NESDIS Collaboration Awards for their contributions as part of a team who created new and upgraded existing content exploiting multimedia, and pivoted the CoastWatch Satellite Course to a virtual environment, hosting educational content on CANVAS at UMD/CISESS. The course materials include lectures, self-paced tutorials and tool demonstrations. Course resources are publicly available here: https://coastwatch.gitbook.io/satellite-course/. The course is followed by a hands-on workshop where participants apply what they have learned to their own projects. Their goal is that, upon course completion, the participants can apply satellite data to projects using their choice of software (e.g. R, python, ArcGIS).
Vogel and Abecassis recently taught a combination virtual and hands-on course designed for the fisheries research community. The fishery researchers use tagged fish to understand population dynamics and ecosystem change; however, use of satellite data in this research is still somewhat limited. In order to fill this gap, the class featured satellite parameters that are underutilized in this research but have been identified by the fisheries community as an area for research growth, such as satellite-derived seascapes, geostrophic currents, sea surface height anomaly and salinity. In addition, CISESS Scientists Vogel and Abecassis expanded existing analytical and teaching tools in order to accommodate the needs of this research community. Group projects allowed participants to use new skills derived from the classroom to support their research.
A class group project presentation slide: Seasonal shifts in U.S. east coast dusky sharks in response to water temperature, 2017-2018, based on tagged shark data from Smithsonian/SERC and satellite sea surface temperature (SST) from NOAA/STAR Coral Reef Watch. Class group project by Roxann Cormier (Univ Mass) and Matthew Larsen (Univ Central FL) for NOAA CoastWatch satellite training Fish-Telemetry Class.
This was the first NOAA CoastWatch class in which the tutorials, in-class activities and other materials were fully tailored to meet the needs of a specific community (the fisheries research community), which demonstrates CoastWatch's expanding remote sensing education service and positions CoastWatch at the cutting edge of scientific research. There were 27 participants from academia, state & federal government, and ocean-observing & fish-telemetry research networks in attendance at least one of the 4 weekly sessions.
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