Web Mapping in the Age of Information: New Avenues for Environmental Research

Maggi Kelly studies the drivers, consequences and spatial patterning of environmental change across California's spatially complex, socially diverse and dynamic landscapes. The systems she focuses on vary in type and scale, and include Sierra Nevada forests, San Francisco Bay wetlands, the California delta, and urban neighborhoods; but all of them are managed landscapes with a complex spatial structure that can be mapped using geospatial tools, and all of them have an interested group of stakeholders for whom the research results have importance. This talk will focus on using the web for participatory mapping, and how new tools can promote data sharing, analysis and collaboration.

Maggie Kelly has a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Colorado in Boulder. After grad school she was a National Research Council postdoc at the National Marine Fisheries Service lab in Beaufort NC. After a short visit as a lecturer in the geography department at San Diego State University, she joined the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley in 1999. Her training is primarily in geospatial technologies and natural-human system interactions, and her technological expertise is in GIScience, which includes remote sensing analysis, geospatial modeling, lidar analysis, participatory webGIS and citizen science and field-based monitoring. She often uses a suite of these tools to address an environmental problem and engage with interested stakeholders. She is also faculty director of the Geospatial Innovation Facility, which is dedicated to bringing cutting-edge mapping technology to students, staff, faculty and others.