Aller Pt. 1 - BTV - DTW

Hopping into the taxi this morning, the cab driver was a lot more talkative than usual - he started off with the usual weather conversation, and then asked where I was going. I told him that I was on my way to France - something that seemed to catch him off guard. He asked what I was doing there, and I said "making maps." 

Making maps is kind of a weird thing to do these days... When I imagine a map maker, it almost certainly involves brass monoscopes, sextants, and flamboyant baroque clothing - I suspect that there are others that share this image.

We got to talking more, and I explained to him the background on the project:

In 2011, I began working pro bono on part of a project spearheaded by Planet Action, an organization that reaches out to various scientific disciplines to come together and work to solve climate issues, specifically in situations where Remote Sensing (satellite imaging) and GIS (making maps) are involved.

The project that I have been working on, under the guidance of Dr. Thomas Houet, seeks to develop automated land cover/land use classification techniques to study the effects of climate change on the Pyrenees Mountains of Southwestern France.

After an initial bit of work exploring the topic, Dr. Houet wrote a grant to continue developing these techniques such that they can be used on images acquired at different dates, in order to study these changes over time.

As part of this grant, I am traveling to Toulouse to work at Dr. Houet's lab in person, and to explore the study area in order to further the goal of developing these techniques.

So begins my Mapping in Mountains journey.