Selfie with Qiqi, ResNet postdoc Lara and I on Qiqi’s last day.
Every once in a while a student will email you out of the blue and ask if they can come work with you. Sometimes you really strike it lucky, too. I was delighted to host Nanjing University PhD candidate Qiqi Zhao in my lab for the last year, working on landscape culturomics in the Bay of Fundy. She extended work by Yan Chen, Tuihedur Rahman and a former French visiting student Camille Caesemaecker, using the same Instagram dataset to understand dykeland and wetland cultural ecosystem services. Her approach leveraged SolVES modelling, which she was already deploying in her own PhD on forest park CES in China. We coauthored three papers together, drawing in other members of my lab and the wider ResNet team (including some text mining techniques), and have plans for one more (at least!). Thank you for your hard work, Qiqi!
This week I squeezed the Atlantic Flood Mapping Conference into my week. On Wednesday, Samantha presented her work to a remarkable assemblage of government, NGO, consulting, academic and other experts in the technology and human dimensions of flood risk and hazard mapping. We could hardly have asked for a more appropriate audience. On the Thursday, after my class, I took part in the workshop component of the event. As part of one of those sessions, I presented some of the social science principles that underlie public resistance to flood risk or hazard mapping, to set the stage for breakout groups on best practices in communication. I included in my presentation media analysis work done by former MREM M.J. Valiquette (funded by CBCL) to inform their flood mapping guidelines for Nova Scotia municipalities. Unfortunately, my session at this event conflicted with the 