Dr. Jessica Rogers
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Dr. Rogers’ Lab 
If you’re interested in working with Dr. Rogers on any of the topics below, please contact her using the web form here

Mapping Invasive Plants

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Matthew King and Robert Luckman in 2017
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Randy Monica Jr., Dr. Rogers, and Nolan Rishe present their research at the Northeast ArcGIS users conference in October, 2018.  

READ ABOUT OUR RESEARCH Published in the Adirondack Journal of Environmental Studies HERE.
Purple Loosestrife (Lyrthum salicaria) is an invasive species that has infested much of the North Country and the St. Lawrence River valley.   
Summer 2017 was our first, and very successful, field season, collecting data throughout St. Lawrence County looking at purple loosestrife, and other invasive species along road sides.  We collected over 1,000 data points looking at homeowners lawns, public areas, agricultural roadsides, and parking areas.  Our route covered State Route 56 from the blue line in South Colton, to Colton, along Rt. 68 to Canton, on to Ogdensburg, then Route 37 to Morristown and Waddington.  From Morristown along Route 12 to Alexandria Bay.  The total route was nearly 88 miles (with both sides of the road, that's trekking nearly 176 miles) in 4 weeks in July and August 2017.  Two interns, Matthew King and Robert Luckman, helped Dr. Rogers collect data using the ESRI Collector App on cell phones, which uploaded data to the cloud and ArcGIS online for Mapping.  
Another successful field season was completed in 2018.  Randy Monica Jr. and Nolan Rishe completed another set of monitoring the whole area.  Another 700 sites were found, only about 340 were duplicates from the previous year.  More research will be needed to continue to understand what's happening with the spread.  All of this research was funded by a grant from the St. Lawrence River Research and Education Fund from the New York Power Authority. 

Beginning in Spring 2019, funded by the St. Lawrence Eastern Lake Ontario Partnership for Regional Invasive Species Management (SLELO PRISM), Dr. Rogers worked with Nolan again, along with Owen Maskell and Samantha Marill.  In addition to a third year of mapping the 88 miles, we began propogating beetles at the WISER Center at SUNY Potsdam and released them at high infestation sites.  
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Thankfully, our outdoor data collection wasn't substantially impacted by the 2020 COVID-19 crisis.  We were able to map another 66 miles of highway, closing the loop between Waddington, Massena, Potsdam and South Colton.  Angus (SUNY Potsdam) and Sage (St. Lawrence University) were excellent interns.  We'll repeat this mapping in 2021, and build a larger beetle hatchery in order to release more beetles to more sites.  Intern applications are being reviewed now!

Drone Research

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Mapping invsaive plants with drones is the next step to understand the spread and extent of invasive plant invasions, partiularly in areas where it's difficult to walk, like wetlands.  Dr. Rogers is an FAA-certified drone pilot and has begun collecting data at the Wilson Hill Wildlife Management Area as well as the Upper and Lower Lakes Wildlife Management Area.  We're still figuring out the most effective ways to map these larger areas and upgrading our computer technology to accommodate such immense amounts of data.  But you can see how great the images are from the image on the left.  The resolution of these images is less than 1cm.  We fly DJI Phantom 4Pro quadcopters as seen below.   
Monitoring Deforestation in Central African Protected Areas
Central Africa has almost 200 different protected areas (National Parks, Forest Reserves, etc.) in 6 countries that make up the Congo Basin Forest.  One of the goals of protected areas is to keep that forested area safe for the future.  However, not all areas are treated equally – deforestation can occur both inside and outside a protected area.  Using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) we look at deforestation around protected areas.  There are a lot of different possible causes for this deforestation, many of which can be examined using remote sensing (satellite images, aerial photography) and GIS (analysis, mapping, etc.).  Students working with Dr. Rogers on this project can look at a lot of different aspects of protected areas, from deforestation, human settlement, road access, etc.   Applications to work on this project are always accepted – tutorials for various credit options can be set up during the spring and fall semesters. 

In Spring 2019, Dr. Rogers and 3 students were able to collect better data from satellites to expand and improve this research.  We added images from 2013 to complement our data from 1990 and 2000.  The analysis of this work will be done by Dr. Rogers and students in Fall 2021.  

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