Congratulations to A H M Mainul Islam, who successfully defended his thesis titled, "ESTIMATING PHOTOSYNTHETIC CAPACITY IN BLIGHTED BUR OAKS USING LEAF HYPERSPECTRAL REFLECTANCE AND MACHINE LEARNING MODELS: MODEL GENERALIZABILITY".

Riley was selected for the School of Earth, Environment, and Sustainability's Harold H. McCarty Award, which is awarded to an outstanding Geography Master’s student. This award is an honor recognizing the high quality of her work and her contribution to the SEES program.

Nina Osborne, Charlotte Hanfland, Beverly Bishop, and Lillie Carreon showcased their semester's research and represented the LOQATE Lab at the Spring Undergraduate Research Festival. Great work!

Dr. Meerdink will be offering SEES:4500 Advanced Remote Sensing in Fall 2026. This class covers the theory and practice of remote sensing using ENVI computer labs and experiments. This class is perfect for students who want the opportunity to learn advanced remote sensing techniques and who are curious about how remote sensing really works.

On March 27, third-year University of Iowa student Nina Osborne was working at the UI Admission Visitors Center when she checked her email. In her inbox, she read that she had been awarded a 2026 Goldwater Scholarship, the country’s most prestigious undergraduate scholarship for students pursuing research careers in mathematics, natural sciences, and engineering.

On Saturday, March 28, A H M Mainul Islam presented his bur oak blight research at the 2026 Annual James F. Jakobsen Research Showcase in the Iowa Memorial Union. The Jakobsen Conference is an annual local conference to promote graduate research and interdepartmental communication at the University of Iowa.

The Office of Undergraduate Research and the Office of the Vice President for Research recognize outstanding accomplishments in scholarly investigation, artistic creation, or performance by an undergraduate student. Nina has been awarded the EURA for her research in the LOQATE lab. Her work uses hyperspectral imaging to monitor landscape-level patterns of tree health. She currently examines Bur oak spectral responses to heat and high CO₂ to detect stress before it becomes visible.

Through this fellowship, Sam will develop a digital storytelling framework using an ArcGIS Story Map to communicate complex satellite remote sensing and machine learning methodologies and their outputs to stakeholders (e.g., water quality managers, local water boards). Sam hopes that through deliberate, practical translation of complex material, we can improve understanding of current technologies, enabling faster decision-making to protect Iowans.

Beverly will continue the work she started in the spring during the group collaborative fellowship, focusing on the water quality of the Okobojis. We are excited to keep her on and dig more into this research!

Lillie and Beverly will be working in the LOQATE Lab on an Office of Undergraduate Research GCRU Fellowship titled, "Exploring 25 years of water quality in the Iowa Great Lakes using data from the volunteer-led Cooperative Lakes Area Monitoring Project (CLAMP)"

Riley Pacer, Jalissa Pirro, Sam Taylor, and Dr. Meerdink headed to New Orleans this year to present their research at the annual American Geophysical Union conference. It was a resounding success and we had a blast.

This manuscript describes the research initiated during Dr. Meerdink's postdoctoral work at the University of Florida as part of a DARPA project. Dr. Meerdink managed the UF team and adapted the Multiple Instance Adaptive Cosine Estimator (MI-ACE) to detect anthocyanin content.

As an Office of Undergraduate Research Fellow, Nina conducted research this summer titled, "Responses of bur oak leaf physiology and spectroscopy to elevated temperature, CO2 and precipitation variability". She presented this work at the Fall Undergraduate Research Festival.

Riley and Mainul represented our lab very well at the 3MT yesterday! Congratulations to both of you for your hard work. Congratulations to Mainul, who won the People's Choice award for Social Sciences and Humanities.

Congratulations to Sam for being awarded a NASA Iowa Space Grant Fellowship in the amount of $6,000, which will support his dissertation work on detection of harmful algal blooms with remote sensing.