About the Author

The author’s first experience in tropical areas occurred while he was a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer working with the Ecuadorian Forest service. These projects included reforestation projects in the Andean region of Ecuador and forest inventory in the Amazonian region.

Following his service in the U.S. Peace Corps, he entered graduate school at the Pennsylvania State University with a research fellowship awarded by the Ford Foundation for International Development. In addition to graduate coursework at Penn State, he came to Costa Rica for an 8 credit-hour graduate course in the Fundamentals of Tropical Ecology through the Organization for Tropical Studies. Subsequent to completing the coursework for a Master’s degree in Forest Management, he returned to Costa Rica to conduct his thesis research in association with the Tropical Science Center. His thesis research focused on the interpretation of 4 different types of aerial film acquired at 2 different scales for making measurements and observations of tropical forest vegetation on study sites occurring in 5 different “life zones”. This research was associated with a larger project for which measurements of primary forest vegetation were made and aerial photography was interpreted for 46 study sites typical of the 12 “life zones” and associations thereof in Costa Rica. The project was conducted by the Tropical Science Center for Wilson, Raimond, & Nuttall Engineers (now defunct) under contract with the Advanced Research Projects Agency. The results of the study were published in a text entitled “Forest Environments in Tropical Life Zones” by L.R. Holdridge et.al. (see the preface of this publication for acknowledgement of the author’s contribution.)

After 6 months of employment on this project, he began a Ph.D. program of study at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science & Forestry at Syracuse University through a research fellowship provided by the National Science Foundation for tropical forest research. After completing coursework and qualifying exams, he returned to Costa Rica to conduct research for his dissertation. This research began with the estimation of forest biomass by life zone derived from the tree measurements for the WNRE project sites and an extrapolation to the forested area of Costa Rica. Subsequently, he compared these estimates of biomass supply with projections of demand for forest products, and developed a model to demonstrate that the forest resource of Costa Rica could sustain a viable forest industry in an ecologically-balanced manner.

After completing his Ph.D. program, he was employed by Aeroservice Inc. on a project in Guyana to determine if the forest resource could support a pulp and paper plant in a sustained manner. Following this employment, he became an employee of the Natural Resources Division of the Interamerican Geodetic Survey (IAGS) headquartered in the Panama Canal Zone. This work involved forest surveys and studies funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development throughout Latin America for which the author had projects in Venezuela, Peru, Panama, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

After three years of employment with IAGS, he transferred to NASA as a research scientist in a new NASA program established at the National Space Technology Laboratories (now Stennis Space Center - SSC) to monitor and study the earth’s resources using data and images acquired by sensors on aircraft and satellites. As a NASA research scientist, he was the Principal Investigator and/or Co-Investigator for four projects in Costa Rica each of which took place over a period of 3 to 4 years during the late 1970’s and 1980’s. These projects involved land use change detection, forest biomass estimation, forest evapo-transpiration studies, and natural resource monitoring involving field studies and the analysis of remotely-sensed data acquired with various types of sensors on satellites and aircraft. During 17 years of the 28 years that he was employed by NASA, he was Chief of the Science Division at SSC.

After retiring from government service, the author came to Costa Rica on an eight-month assignment through the Fulbright Senior Scholar program to teach courses on the use of remote sensing for environmental monitoring and to conduct land use change studies in conjunction with the University of Costa Rica (UCR) and the Technology Institute of Costa Rica. During this assignment, he began collecting information and data on the social, economic, and political factors that influence forest alteration and land use change. After this assignment, he taught environmental geography and conservation courses as part of the University of New Orleans Summer Institute in Costa Rica and was a consultant to the Louisiana Board of Regions for liaison between Louisiana Universities and government agencies.

In January 2003, he began employment with the Science Applications International Corp.(SAIC) to support a cooperative project between NASA and the Costa Rican National Center for Advanced Technology (CENAT) referred to as the Costa Rican Aircraft Research and Technology Applications (CARTA) project. This project involved two major aircraft missions (2003 & 2005) during which NASA aircraft and sensors were used to acquire various types of remotely-sensed images over Costa Rica. In this context, the author provided liaison with personnel from Costa Rican government agencies and universities for the flight planning, data acquisition, data analysis and application of the data to land use studies..

Most recently, the author is a Co-Chair of the Technical Program Committee for the 32nd International Symposium for Remote Sensing of Environment scheduled to take place in Costa Rica during June 2007.