CFEP Faculty in Geospatial Analytics of Emerging Plant Disease Hired
As part of the NC State Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program (CFEP) we have hired Dr. Robert Scheller to be part of an interdisciplinary faculty cluster on “Emerging Plant Disease and Global Food Security.” We are conducting solution-driven research and developing cutting-edge geospatial analytics for deployment of next generation decision-making and knowledge-sharing frameworks designed to improve local and global efforts to manage emerging pathogens that threaten crop and forest production and food/fiber security. Examples include analytics for spatially-explicit prediction of transmission pathways and deploying rapid response strategies to detect and limit potential damage by emerging threats. Approaches that leverage frontiers in citizen science, such as crowd sourcing data collection with mobile technologies and engaging stakeholders with computational models.
Dr. Scheller is Professor of Landscape Ecology at North Carolina State University and the Director of the Dynamic Ecosystems and Landscapes Lab. He grew up in Minnesota and received his B.S. in Biology from the University of Minnesota and Masters and Doctoral degrees in Forest Ecology from the University of Wisconsin. His research focuses on landscape change: how forests have changed, how they will change, and why it matters. Specifically, his research examines how management and natural disturbances generate or reduce resilience, specifically in regards to climate change. Resilience can be expressed in many ways; Robert focuses on managed resilience (our social capacity to mitigate undesirable change), biological resilience (plant and animal abundance on the landscape), functional resilience (carbon dynamics, ecosystem processes, and broad-scale disturbance regimes) and spatial resilience (the spatial distribution of managed, biological, and functional components). His research is data-driven and deploys advanced technology to forecast landscape change. He has published more than 50 manuscripts and book chapters and has received funding from NSF, DOD, USDA, USFS, USGS, BLM, EPA and others.