When Professor Jodi Brandt joined Human-Environment Systems in 2015, her background exemplified the program’s raison d’etre. She brought experience working on problems at the intersection of humans and the environment.
“As a postdoc, I worked with a political scientist,” Brandt said. “So even though I was trained in an ecology department, I was really immersed in the social and political science world.”
That background serves Brandt and Boise State well in her work on landscape ecology. She is one of an emerging crop of scientists using new remote sensing technology to study the impact of human activity on the environment.
“Remote sensing is basically these satellites that circle the Earth,” Brandt said. “They’re able to continuously collect observations of the Earth’s surface.”
The data collected from remote sensing can help inform the efforts of researchers on the ground. One example of this is Brandt’s work on beaver rewilding — the process of bringing beavers back to their historical habitats in the Mountain West.
Traditional ecology would involve making landscape changes to encourage the return of beaver populations, then returning to the rewilding site many times to gather data and evaluate the impact of those changes. However, promising sites for rewilding are often well off the beaten trail and ground-based researchers can only cover so much territory on their own.
That’s where remote sensing comes in. “We can’t actually detect beavers from space, but we can detect the impact of the beavers,” Brandt said. The addition of satellite imaging to the project extends researchers’ ability to measure their impact.
Brandt’s work goes way beyond beavers. One recent research project sees her using new technology to map water in the semi-arid deserts of southern Idaho. Another focuses on agriculture land loss to protect farmland in the United States in collaboration with sociologist Rebecca Som Castellano, who is the director of Human-Environment Systems, and Vicken Hillis, an associate professor in Human-Environment Systems.
Brandt’s graduate students continue to push the envelope on using new technologies to innovate for ecological research. One of her students, Juan Camilo Rojas Lucero, recently won a NASA FINESST award for his work using artificial intelligence and deep learning to monitor water levels in semi-arid regions.
“None of my work would be possible without the amazing grad students and postdocs with whom I work,” Brandt said. “Our work relies so much on new remote sensing and analytical technologies, and these young scientists are really the ones learning and applying the most cutting-edge techniques.”
After a decade of teaching and research in Human-Environment Systems, Brandt’s work continues to demonstrate the themes that brought her to Boise State: interdisciplinary collaboration at the intersection of humans and the environment. Her work has significant implications for the Idaho landscape and the Idahoans who rely on it.