The CGA team would like to congratulate our GIS analyst, Caley Higgs, for publishing an academic article. The article, entitled Signature Extension as a Machine Learning Strategy for Mapping Plantation Forest Genera with Sentinel-2 Imagery, was published in the Remote Sensing Applications: Society and Environment journal in Jaunary of 2024. Having completed her Masters of Sciences degree on the same topic last year, it was natural to follow with this publication.
Caley forged ahead with the help of her co-author, our Director, Prof Adriaan van Niekerk. She admits that his mentorship and feedback was invaluable: “I am very privileged that I got the opportunity to work with Adriaan on this paper as he is an expert in Remote Sensing and has published papers in the past.” Their goal with this paper was to show that a little information can go a long way. They utilised machine learning with satellite images to map tree types in plantation forests. They then made this more efficient by training with data from one small area and applying it to other bigger areas.
This article, however, didn’t come without a little bother. Adapting it from her Masters meant she had to jump through a few hoops before publishing. “I had to add in some additional results, improve the way I wrote the discussion, and, of course, I had to reformat the paper to align with the Journal’s requirements.” This is where Adriaan’s experience came in very handy, especially with writing improvements and the explanation of some results.
Caley would like to thank Adriaan, for all his guidance. Also, the Water Research Commission, who funded her Masters, and Helene van Niekerk, who edited the paper. “I am deeply grateful to all of them, as this paper would not have been possible without their support.”
Caley says she feels proud that she got this paper published. The CGA team is proud of her as well.