The CGA is growing!

The CGA expanded at the beginning of 2019, adding a number of new members of staff to our team. We would like to welcome Dr Tara Southey, Mr Adriaan Prins and Mr Christiaan Theron.

Dr Tara Southey joined the CGA in April as Postdoctoral Researcher focusing on climate change in the wine industry. Her postdoctoral research aims to better understand the unique climate dynamics in the Western Cape in an agricultural production setting. Tara’s skills in viticulture and climate analysis provide a vital component to the CGA for a number of research and development projects in the wine industry. She is currently involved in building an integrated climate, GIS, remote sensing and grapevine database, which is aimed at providing wine grape farmers with decision-making tools to develop adaptation and mitigation strategies in the context of climate change.

Mr Adriaan Prins (Atman) joined the CGA in full-time position as a GIS and Earth Observation analyst in January 2019, after completing his MSc in Geoinformatics in 2018. After working at the CGA in a part-time capacity as a scripter in 2018, Atman’s primary responsibility is the development of automated workflows for agricultural modelling from remote sensing and drone imagery, including orthomosaic and point cloud creation, crop plant delineation, crop health analysis and production of agricultural maps.

Mr Christiaan Theron, joined the CGA in a full-time position as a GIS scripter and Earth Observation Scripter in January 2019, after completing his BSc Honours in Geoinformatics in 2018. Christiaan, who also worked for the CGA as part-time scripter while completing his degree, is now involved with developing automated workflows for the SUDEM5 and DEMSA2 elevation models, as well as for satellite imagery acquisition and processing, climate modelling, and developing elevation products for coastal assessment.

In January 2019, the CGA team also expanded to include four Geoinformatics students as part-time GIS Data Capturers:  Mr Hanu Mostert, Ms Lauren McCarthy, Ms Caley Higgs and Mr Ockert Malan.