Presented by: Professor Martin Wooster, King’s College London
Date and time: 12:30 – 14:00 – Wednesday 25 June, 2008

One instrument of hazard management and early warning lies with satellite imagery. Satellites are tools which can be used remotely to monitor climate change, population movements, and the destruction of villages. These issues facing the humanitarian sector in the future will become increasingly global, and reflects greater complexity which may result in considerable human and physical impacts which require effective and efficient management by the humanitarian sector. The challenge is now to understand how remote sensing technology can be used by humanitarian community to help monitor and formulate disaster responses.

Professor Martin Wooster joined the Department of Geography in 1998 on a lectureship funded by the NERC Earth Observation Science Initiative (one of four such lectureships awarded nationally in the UK). In 2005 he was appointed Professor of Earth Observation Science at KCL, where he currently heads the Environmental Monitoring and Modelling Research Group. Martin holds a BSc in Physics (Bristol) and an MSc in Remote Sensing (University of London), with a PhD in Earth Sciences (Open University). Areas of work included vegetation, rainfall and lake/ocean monitoring, for such diverse applications as famine early warning, forest fire detection and fisheries investigations. A key current interest is in quantifying the role vegetation fires (biomass burning) play in exchanges of material between the land surface and the atmosphere, and the development of remote sensing approaches to help address this question. Martin Wooster has published in excess of 40 papers in peer-reviewed journals and sits on steering committees of the NERC Field Spectroscopy Facility and the NERC Airborne Remote Sensing Facility.