holmes

(HERO object-based Lawn Mapping Exploration of Suburbia) is a subgroup of the HERO project which conducts .45 meter resolution mapping of the Plum Island Ecosystems Long Term Ecological Research Site. It was created in September 2006, when two geography professors at Clark University (Colin Polsky and Gil Pontius) recognized the need for a high-resolution dataset to foster collaborative research with two ecologists (Chuck Hopkinson and Wil Wollheim). That discussion formed the basis for a successful, $1.4M grant proposal to NSF’s Coupled Natural-Human Systems competition, submitted in November 2006 and awarded in May 2007. This project uses the premise described above about suburbanization to examine social dynamics, ecological dynamics, and coupled socio-ecological dynamics.