France Gerard
Senior Scientist
Earth Sciences
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (Institute of Freshwater Ecology)
United Kingdom
Biography
Dr. Gerard is currently CO-I in the NERC grant project VERA (Vegetation-Rainfall Feedbacks in Africa), and NERC consortium grant project “WESSEX-BESS” (linking biodiversity change with the delivery of ecosystem services across landscapes now and into the future) for which her team is delivering a fine spatial resolution land cover map from combined airborne hyper-spectral and lidar imagery. She is involved in the EU funded project ROBIN characterising the vegetation leaf phenology across Meso - and South America to enhance spatial maps of biodiversity and support the validation of the Dynamic Global Vegetation Model of JULES and LPJ.
Research Interest
Dr. Gerard’s research covers the retrieval of grassland and forest parameters from optical sensors; remote sensing of land and vegetation cover, and characterising vegetation dynamics and phenology in a wide range of environments (boreal, and sub-tropical forests, temperate and semi-arid grasslands), focussing on the development of EO-derived data to constrain and validate models and support process understanding.
Publications
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Mitchard, E.T.A.; Saatchi, S.S.; Lewis, S.L.; Feldpausch, T.R.; Gerard, F.F.; Woodhouse, I.H.; Meir, P., 2011, Comment on ‘A first map of tropical Africa’s above-ground biomass derived from satellite imagery’. Environmental Research Letters, 6
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Redhead, John; Cuevas-Gonzales, Maria; Smith, Geoffrey; Gerard, France; Pywell, Richard, 2012, Assessing the effectiveness of scrub management at the landscape scale using rapid field assessment and remote sensing. Journal of Environmental Management, 97, 102-108
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Clerici, Nicola; Weissteiner, Christof J.; Gerard, France, 2012, Exploring the use of MODIS NDVI-based phenology indicators for classifying forest general habitat categories . Remote Sensing, 4, 1781-1803
