Nancy Thomas

Nancy was hired as the Executive Director of the GIF in 2014. She has over 18 years of experience in managing successful GIS and remote sensing projects in both consulting and academic arenas. Nancy brings extensive experience in the development and analysis of gespatial data to map, monitor, and model land use and land cover for a variety of domestic and international natural resource managment applications. She has given numerous presentations and workshops on geospatial technologies and facilitated many successful research collaborations.

Prior to her hire at UC Berkeley, Nancy was most recently the Geospatial Manager of the Spatial Analysis Center at Stanford University. Nancy trained students and researchers on geospatial mapping tools and was the lead remote sensing scientist on several projects focused on mapping land use transitions, including shifts from deforestation to reforestation.

Nancy received her B.A. from San Francisco State University and her M.A. in Geography from the University of Maryland. Her research includes mapping forest disturbance in the conterminous United States using dense time series Landsat imagery and object-based forest change detection from high-resolution satellite data.

Remote Sensing

Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Object-based image analysis (eCognition)

Land use/land cover change analysis

ENVI and ERDAS Imagine software

Image classification (CART, Random Forests, etc.)

Field data collection and accuracy assessment