Irish work

MSc thesis: Effects of sea level rise on habitats around Clew Bay, University of Ulster, 2009. Grade: Distinction. The project involved using many different sources of spatial information including land cover maps, habitat maps, point data, aerial photos, processing and interpreting a Landsat image and using a Digital Elevation Model.

Central America/Caribbean work

Susan Iremonger has been involved in several projects where Landsat and Spot images and aerial photographs have been used for mapping different vegetation types (1991-1999). This was carried out on a country-wide scale for Jamaica, Belize and Honduras, and for national parks in the Caribbean and Central America. Working with other specialists, the teams identified signatures for different vegetation and other land cover types and used an extrapolation technique to find areas with similar reflectances. Visual interpretation of high-quality prints of satellite images was also used to pinpoint the range of different land cover types in each project and to map them. In every case the image interpretation was assisted by extensive fieldwork, involving ground-based expeditions and aerial overflights in fixed-wing aircraft or helicopter. GPS technology was used to identify exact locations on the geo-referenced images. Susan Iremonger identified different vegetation types by carrying out intensive ground surveys and where plant identification was not possible on the spot, collections were made and identified at a later date in herbaria. In most cases the projects involved training local officials and NGO representatives in the field and laboratory techniques.

Susan was subsequently involved in a project to map the vegetation of every country in Central America, mainly in a training role, and using the same methodologies as for the first national maps described above. Using mainly high quality prints of Landsat imagery and supplementing these with knowledge from literature or from other specialists in the vegetation of each region, maps were made for each country in Central America using an agreed vegetation classification system based on that of UNESCO, as in the original maps. This system is particularly suited to interpretation of images as it is primarily based on the structure of the vegetation, and takes flora into account at more detailed levels.