Training

Courses

CEE 194A: Environmental Informatics

The environmental informatics is like a bridge, which attracts Environmental students to extend their studies outside the Environment!

Why: Environmental studies are an interdisciplinary field, and students come from diversified academic backgrounds, such as environmental engineering, biology, chemistry, physics, math, agriculture, economics or even humanity subjects like law and histories. The highly specified backgrounds should not be the barriers for their further collaboration and development, thus the students should be trained in many aspects outside their research, such as public speaking, literacy, group interaction, and technical writing/editing. The Environmental Informatics course aims at guiding students how to do their research efficiently.

Targeted students: This course would be more productive if the students are second year Master's students or above (or undergraduate with specific research topics), because the course was designed to be "open topic and individual-based", say, there is no text book to follow and exams to take. The only clue of this course is each student's research (e.g. Master's thesis or Ph.D. dissertation.)

CEE 194: Global Environmental Datasets
Instructor: Dr. Magaly Koch, Co-instructor: Dr. Elena Naumova

This new introductory-level course focuses on geospatial data concepts, methods and tools used for the study of global environmental change. Growing concern about human impact on the environment has led to the development of new observation and analysis tools to tackle and monitor types, magnitudes and rates of environmental changes. Timely observations by Earth Observation (EO) satellite systems and improved mapping and analysis tools are enabling a better understanding of the ecological interactions that underlie our Earth systems which is critical for developing sustainable solutions. This course will enable students to search and use satellite imagery (higher level products) in the context of a number of disciplines including climatology, ecology, geology, hydrology, and public health. Students will learn the fundamentals of the EO systems and the tools (geo-portals, web based tools, open source software) to observe, monitor and assess the changes occurring on or near the Earth surface.