Florencia Sangermano | Clark University (original) (raw)

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Papers by Florencia Sangermano

Data in brief, 2015

Deforestation is one of the major threats to habitats in the Dominican Republic. In this work we ... more Deforestation is one of the major threats to habitats in the Dominican Republic. In this work we present a forest baseline for the year 2000 and a deforestation map for the year 2011. Maps were derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Radiometer (MODIS) products at 250 m resolution. The vegetation continuous fields product (MOD44B) for the year 2000 was used to produce the forest baseline, while the vegetation indices product (MOD13Q1) was used to detect change between 2000 and 2011. Major findings based on the data presented here are reported in the manuscript "Habitat suitability and protection status of four species of amphibians in the Dominican Republic" (Sangermano et al., Appl. Geogr.,) [7].63, 2015, 55-65.

International Journal of Remote Sensing - INT J REMOTE SENS, 2011

Analysis of land-cover change in the seasonal tropical forests of the Southern Yucatán, Mexico pr... more Analysis of land-cover change in the seasonal tropical forests of the Southern Yucatán, Mexico presents a number of significant challenges for the fine-scale land-cover information required of land-change science. Subtle variation in mature forest types across the regional ecocline is compounded by vegetation transitions following agricultural land uses. Such complex mapping environments require innovation in multispectral classification methodologies. This research presents an application of a step-wise maximum likelihood/In-Process Classification Assessment (IPCA) procedure. This hybrid supervised and unsupervised classification methodology allows for exploration of underlying characteristics of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery in tropical environments. Once spectrally separable classes have been identified, field data then determine the ecological definition of vegetation types with special attention paid to areas of unknown or mixed classes. A post-field assessment re-classification using the Dempster–Shafer method reduced the original 25 spectral classes to 14 ecologically distinctive classes, providing the fine-tuned land-cover distinctions that are required for both environmental and socioeconomic research questions. The overall map accuracy was 87% with an average per-class accuracy of 86%. Per-class accuracy ranged from as low as 45% for pasture grass to a high of 100% for tall-stature evergreen upland forest, low and medium-stature semi-deciduous upland forest and deciduous forest.

Medical and …, Jan 1, 2011

Landscape Ecology, Jan 1, 2012

geogra.uah.es

A significant resource in the analysis of biodiversity for conservation planning is the archive o... more A significant resource in the analysis of biodiversity for conservation planning is the archive of species range polygons developed on the basis of expert knowledge. However, these polygons are known to contain omissions (because of knowledge gaps) and imprecision ...

International Journal of …, Jan 1, 2012

… Journal of Remote …, Jan 1, 2011

Memorias XI Conferencia …, Jan 1, 2007

Transactions in GIS, Jan 1, 2010

Land use change models are increasingly being used to evaluate the effect of land change on clima... more Land use change models are increasingly being used to evaluate the effect of land change on climate and biodiversity and to generate scenarios of deforestation. Although many methods are available to model land transition potentials, they are usually not user-friendly and require the specification of many parameters, making the task difficult for decision makers not familiar with the tools, as well as making the process difficult to interpret. In this article we propose a simple method for modeling transition potentials. SimWeight is an instance-based learning algorithm based on the logic of the K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm. The method identifies the relevance of each driver variable and predicts the transition potential of locations given known instances of change. A case study was used to demonstrate and validate the method. Comparison of results with the Multi-Layer Perceptron neural network (MLP) suggests that SimWeight performs similarly in its capacity to predict transition potentials, without the need for complex parameters. Another advantage of SimWeight is that it is amenable to parallelization for deployment on a cloud computing platform.

… Journal of Remote …, Jan 1, 2009

ecological …, Jan 1, 2008

This paper presents a novel methodology for multi-scale and multi-type spatial data integration i... more This paper presents a novel methodology for multi-scale and multi-type spatial data integration in support of insect pest risk/vulnerability assessment in the contiguous United States. Probability of gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar L.) establishment is used as a case study. A neural network facilitates the integration of variables representing dynamic anthropogenic interaction and ecological characteristics. Neural network model (back-propagation network [BPN]) results are compared to logistic regression and multi-criteria evaluation via weighted linear combination, using the receiver operating characteristic area under the curve (AUC) and a simple threshold assessment. The BPN provided the most accurate infestation-forecast predictions producing an AUC of 0.93, followed by multi-criteria evaluation (AUC = 0.92) and logistic regression (AUC = 0.86) when independently validating using post model infestation data. Results suggest that BPN can provide valuable insight into factors contributing to introduction for invasive species whose propagation and establishment requirements are not fully understood. The integration of anthropogenic and ecological variables allowed production of an accurate risk model and provided insight into the impact of human activities.

Ecological …, Jan 1, 2007