I am an environmental scientist whose research activities revolve around the application of remote sensing and other geospatial tools to wildlife ecology and environmental management. I am involved in a wide variety of interdisciplinary research collaborations in the fields of wildlife ecology, biodiversity assessment, ecological monitoring, plant-phenology monitoring, and vegetation mapping. I'm interested in a broad range of remote sensing and other GIScience pursuits, including digital image processing, spatial analysis, environmental modelling, and data fusion/integration - particularly in forested and high-relief environments.

Biography:

I joined the department in January, 2005 and was promoted to Associate Professor in April, 2011. I've studied at the University of Calgary (B.Sc., 1991; M.Sc. 1993) and the University of Waterloo (Ph.D., 2005) in areas of physical geography, GIS, and environmental remote sensing. Prior to this current academic gig, I founded and managed an Internet publishing and consulting company out of Fort Collins, Colorado from 1994 to 2001.

Recent Publications

Pending

Bater, C.W., Coops, N.C., Wulder, M.A., Nielsen, S.E., McDermid, G., Stenhouse, G.B: Design and installation of a camera network across an elevation gradient for habitat assessment. Instrumentation Science and Technology, in press.

Franklin, S.E., Y. He, A.D. Pape, G.J. McDermid, and X. Guo: Landsat-comparable land cover maps using the ASTER and SPOT images: a case study for large-area mapping programs. International Journal of Remote Sensing, in press.

Coops, N.C., T. Hilker, C.W. Bater, M.A. Wulder, S. Nielsen, G.J. McDermid, G. Stenhouse: Linking ground-based to satellite-derived phenological metrics in support of habitat assessment. Remote Sensing Letters, in press.

McLane, A.J., C. Semeniuk, G.J. McDermid, and D. Marceau. The role of agent-based models in wildlife ecology and management: The importance of accommodating individual habitat-selection behaviours and spatially explicit movement for conservation planning. Ecological Modelling, in press.

Castilla, G., J. Linke, A.J. McLane, and G.J. McDermid. The effect of landscape-sample displacement on pattern indices. Canadian Journal of Forest Research, in review.

Chen, G., K. Zhao, and G.J. McDermid. The influence of sampling density on geographically weighted regression: a case study using forest canopy height and optical data. International Journal of Remote Sensing, in review.

Polfus, J., A. J. McLane, G. J. McDermid, M. Hebblewhite, R. Tingey, and K. Heinemeyer: Remote sensing-based land cover classification to support northern woodland caribou conservation. Canadian Journal of Forest Research, in review.

Published

Bater, C.W., Coops, N.C., Wulder, M.A., Hilker, T., Nielsen, S.E., McDermid, G., Stenhouse, G.B., 2010. Using digital time-lapse cameras to monitor species-specific understorey and overstorey phenology in support of wildlife habitat assessment. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment. doi: 10.1007/s10661-010-1768-x. Click here to download.

Musiani, M., M. Anwar, G.J. McDermid, M. Hebblewhite, and D. Marceau, 2010: How humans shape wolf behavior in Banff and Kootenay National Parks, Canada. Ecological Modelling, 221: 2374-2387. Click here to download.

Stewart, B.P., M.A. Wulder, G.J. McDermid, and T. Nelson, 2010: Disturbance capture and attribution through the integration of Landsat and IRS-1C imagery. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing, 35(6): 523-533. Click here to download.

Nielsen, S.E., G.J. McDermid, G.B. Stenhouse, and M.S. Boyce, 2010: Dynamic wildlife habitat models: Seasonal foods and mortality risk predict occupancy-abundance and habitat selection in grizzly bears. Biological Conservation, 143(7): 1623-1634. Click here to download.

Linke, J. and G. J. McDermid, 2010: A conceptual model for multi-temporal landscape monitoring in an object-based environment. Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, doi: 10.1109/JSTARS.2010.2045881. Click here to download.

Wang, K., S.E. Franklin, X. Guo, Y. He, and G.J. McDermid, 2009: Problems in remote sensing of landscapes and habitats. Progress in Physical Geography, 33(6): 747-768, doi:10.1177/0309133309350121. Click here to download.

McLane, A.J., G.J. McDermid, and M.A. Wulder, 2009: Processing discrete-return profiling LiDAR data to estimate canopy closure for large-area forest mapping and management. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing, 35(3): 217-229. Click here to download.

Hilker, T., M.A. Wulder, N.C. Coops, J. Linke, G.J. McDermid, J.G. Masek, F. Gao, and J.C. White, 2009: A new data fusion model for high spatial- and temporal-resolution mapping of forest disturbance based on Landsat and MODIS. Remote Sensing of Environment, 113(8): 1613–1627, doi:10.1016/j.rse.2009.03.007. Click here to download.

Linke, J., G.J. McDermid, D.N. Laskin, A.J. McLane, A.D. Pape, J. Cranston, M. Hall-Beyer, and S.E. Franklin, 2009: A disturbance-inventory framework for flexible and reliable landscape monitoring. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 75(8): 981-996. Click here to download.

McDermid, G.J., R.J. Hall, G.A. Sanchez-Azofeifa, S.E. Franklin, G.B. Stenhouse, T. Kobliuk, and E.F. LeDrew, 2009: Remote sensing and forest inventory for wildlife habitat assessment. Forest Ecology and Management, 257(11): 2262-2269, doi:10.1016/j.foreco.2009.03.05. Click here to download.

Hird, J. and G.J. McDermid, 2009: Noise reduction of NDVI time series: An empirical comparison of selected techniques. Remote Sensing of Environment, 113(1): 248-258, doi:10.1016/j.rse.2008.09.003. Click here to download. Click here to download.

Linke, J., G.J. McDermid, A.D. Pape, A.J. McLane, D.N. Laskin, M. Hall-Beyer, and S.E. Franklin, 2009: The influence of patch delineation mismatches on multi-temporal landscape pattern analysis. Landscape Ecology, 24(2): 157-170, doi:10.1007/s10980-008-9290-z. Click here to download.

McDermid, G.J., N.C. Coops, M.A. Wulder, S.E. Franklin, and N. Seitz, 2009: Critical Remote Sensing Data Contributions to Spatial Wildlife Ecological Knowledge and Management, invited chapter in S. Cushman and F. Huettmann (Eds.), Spatial Complexity, Informatics, and Wildlife Conservation, pp 193-221, Springer, Tokyo ISBN: 978-4-431-87770-7. Click here to download.

McDermid, G.J., J. Linke, A.D. Pape, D.N. Laskin, A.J. McLane, and S.E. Franklin, 2008: Object-based approaches to change analysis and thematic map update: challenges and limitations. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing, 34(5): 462-466. Click here to download.

McDermid, G.J. and I.U. Smith, 2008: Mapping the distribution of whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) in Waterton Lakes National Park using logistic regression and classification tree analysis. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing, 34(4): 356-366. Click here to download.

Hebblewhite, M., E. Merrill, and G.J. McDermid, 2008: A multi-scale test of the forage maturation hypothesis in a partially migratory ungulate population, Ecological Monographs, 78(2): 141-166, doi:10.1890/06-1708.1. Click here to download.

McDermid, G.J., S.E. Franklin, and E.F. LeDrew, 2005: Remote sensing for large-area habitat mapping. Progress in Physical Geography, 29(4): 449-474. Click here to download.

Graduate Student Alumni

2010

Julia Linke, PhD (currently a PostDoc in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto) - Development and application of a framework for flexible and reliable landscape monitoring: changes in the Alberta foothills and the impact on grizzly bear habitat.

Erin Latham, MGIS (currently a PhD student in the Department of Geography, University of Victoria) - Changes in bighorn sheep habitat of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

2009

Aleksandra Sobol, MGIS (currently with Freestone Consulting) - The impact of sampling intensity and failed GPS acquisitions on animal home-range estimation.

2008

Ben Curry, MGIS - A comparison of relative and absolute change detection for measuring forest disturbance.

Shadan Sanii, MGIS (currently with Stantec) - Assessing the effect of point density and terrain complexity of LiDAR-derived DEMs in multiple resolutions.

Jennifer Hird, MSc (currently with the Foothills Facility for Remote Sensing and GIScience) - Noise reduction for time series of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI): an empirical comarison of selected techniques.

2007

Iain Smith, MGIS (currently with Timberline Natural Resources Group) - Mapping the distribution of whitebark pine in Waterton Lakes National Park using logistic regression and classification tree analysis.

Sarah Miall, MGIS (currently with Suncor Energy) - Knowledge formulation with H-resolution satellite imagery: object-oriented versis pixel-based approaches.

Adam McLane. MGIS (currently a PhD student at the University of Calgary) - Processing discrete-return profiling LiDAR data to estimate canopy closure for the purpose of grizzly bear management in northern Alberta.

Katie Yalte, MGIS (currently with the Foothills Research Institute) - Relative change detection: an overlooked advantage.

2006

Prasanna Man Shrestha, MGIS (currently with Tera Environmental Consutants) - Comparison of ordinary-least-squares regression, spatial autoregression, and geographically-weighted regression for modeling forest structural attributes using a geographical information system/remote sensing approach.

Dan Austin, MGIS (currently with Summit Environmental Consultants) - Object-oriented processing and high-spatial-resolution imagery: Comparison of pixel- and object-based image classification of an IKONOS-2 image centered around Barrier Lake, Alberta.