Greg Asner - A Brief Biography

Greg Asner earned an undergraduate degree in environmental engineering in 1991 from the University of Colorado. He then began working with the Hawaiian Nature Conservancy. He felt that Hawaii “could be considered a microcosm of the entire planet.” He soon realized that the data collected by the field crew was inefficient. This search for better and more efficient gathering of geographic data has been the focus of his career. He returned to the University of Colorado; he completed his masters in geology in 1995 and earned a PhD from the Department of Environmental Population and Organismic Biology in 1997. He did a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in 1998 and later become a staff scientist at the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science. According to his biographical sketch on the Stanford website, Asner “directs the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, a new airborne laser and hyperspectral remote sensing platform designed for regional assessments of the carbon, water, and biodiversity services provided by ecosystems to society.”

He began working with aerial data collection methods and has ultimately developed a system that allows for the mapping of up to 40,000 acres per day. The mapping system gathers information on scanning forest chemistry, water levels, nitrogen levels, and carbon levels. The mapping system is a combination of laser scanning, hyperspectral imaging and software developed to process the data. This aerial data collection system allows for individual trees to be viewed.

In 2005, Greg Asner’s work showed that the practice of selective logging can be as destructive as clear cutting. When a single tree is harvested, “it tends to pull down a lot of the understory trees and the young trees.” By analyzing “photographs with temperature and light reading,” it is now possible to see the damage of small-scale logging operations on the forest.

Next posting: Literature Review, the early years

Biographical Sketch of Greg Asner. Stanford University. Retrieved February 4, 2009 from http://asnerlab.stanford.edu/personnel/asner/asner_personal.html.

Block, M. (2005, October 20). Analysis: mixed report of state of Amazon forests. All things considered (NPR). Retrieved February 4, 2009 from Newspaper Source database.

Greg Asner. Biography Reference Bank. 2008. Retrieved 30 January 2009 from Biography Reference Bank database: http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/.

Thompson, K. (2007). Mapping Maverick. Popular Science, 271 (5), 76-77. Retrieved January 30, 2009 from Newspaper Source database.