Dr. Kate Fickas is a Mendenhall Fellow and research geographer with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center and the University of California, Santa Barbara Climate Hazard Center.
Dr. Kate Fickas is a Mendenhall Fellow and research geographer with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center and the University of California, Santa Barbara Climate Hazard Center. In her research, she combines dense Landsat time series and harmonic models with gridded climate data to help understand how aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem dynamics vary over space and time and how to predict spectral information under a changing climate. Additionally, her passion lies in wetlands and water quality and she works with collaborators from state and federal agencies to explore novel uses of remote sensing data for aquatic resource monitoring. She is currently a member of the Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection (LCMAP) team at EROS. Dr. Fickas received her B.S. from University of Oregon and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Oregon State University with Dr. Warren Cohen in projects characterizing wetland ecohydrological dynamics with Landsat spectral temporal features. She spent time as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, evaluating salt marsh wetland vulnerability to sea level rise with UAS time series data. Dr. Fickas is also the founder and co-director of the outreach group Ladies of Landsat and works towards increasing diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and accessibility in the fields of remote sensing and earth observation.