Professional summary
Research Interests
Dr Gerard has over 25 years of experience in Earth Observation of vegetation and land in a wide range of ecosystems. Her work focuses on the development of remotely sensed-derived data to monitor vegetation, support process understanding and constrain and validate models. Dr Gerard is currently Principal Investigator of the NERC AHRC funded Newton project PARAGUAS investigating how plant diversity contributes to water regulation in the Colombian páramo (i.e. Andean high latitude wetlands) and how local people relate to and affect the páramo. A component of the work involved drone remote sensing to characterise páramo plants and vegetation communities. Using field radiometry, drone, aircraft and satellite remote sensing, she and her team have worked on mapping plant species, flowers, land cover, forest types, vegetation communities and burnt area and on characterising wetland dynamics, grassland condition and tropical leaf/plant phenology.