Bio

Kristofer is a remote sensing scientist with the Geospatial Research laboratory (GRL), Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), U.S. Army Corps of Engineers which is a federal government research laboratory. He works in the area of multi-sensor satellite remote sensing and land cover mapping. His current research focuses on improving land cover classification models by detecting and compensating for landscape shadows in winter imagery. He has served as PI or Team lead on a variety of other GIS and remote sensing projects, and has served as an internship supervisor for NSF-funded PhD students, M.S. GIS students, and others. He is an Editor for PLOS ONE and Frontiers in Remote Sensing. Prior to joining GRL, Kristofer was a SMART Scholar and research Assistant for the NASA Land Cover and Land Use Change Program while completing his PhD at University of Maryland. His dissertation focused on characterizing biomass and emissions from agricultural fires with a remote sensing and field-based approach. During his PhD, he conducted field work in Vietnam and led various GIS capacity building workshops at Universities across Southeast Asia with funding from a non-profit organization, and was a Green Fund Fellow conducting interdisciplinary work on fire burning practices with the Fire Protection Engineering Department. Kristofer has taught several courses at the University of Maryland including GIS, remote sensing, and spatial modeling. Prior to his PhD, he worked as a Geospatial Data Scientist at the University of Maryland and interned at NASA JPL and NASA GSFC.

Kristofer is located on campus in Bozeman, MT and is available for M.S. and PhD committees and for student internships.

Education

PhD, Geographical Sciences (Land Cover and Land Use Change), University of Maryland, 2018

MS, Geospatial Information Science, University of Maryland, 2014

BS, Geography, University of Maryland, 2012

Selected Research

  • Automated mapping of land cover type with satellite imagery time series
  • Detection and Correction of landscape shadows in high latitude regions with multispectral imagery and SAR
  • Characterizing rice straw biomass and associated fire emissions
  • How do deep neural networks understand changing and featureless landscapes?
  • Decision support tool for GIS-based land management by US Army Corps of Engineers technicians
  • Forecasting snowmelt onset and snow-off dates with radar time series and a random forest
  • Using spaceborne and airborne SAR to characterize spatial patterns in soil moisture and seasonal thaw timing
  • Agricultural land use change in Central and Northeast Thailand

Publications

Kristofer’s research publications can be viewed at his Google Scholar profile here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-e9-dakAAAAJ&hl=en