On Tuesday March 6, Intergraph and DigitalGlobe announced that Priyanka Mehta and Allison Howard are the two winners of the 2012 Geospatial Challenge. This contest was an opportunity for individuals in the fields of remote sensing and GIS to submit their research on innovative ways of using DigitalGlobe’s unique WorldView-2 satellite imagery in Intergraph’s ERDAS IMAGINE software. This contest received more than 115 proposals from remote sensing experts around the globe.

Priyanka Mehta’s research sought to classify urban land use and land cover to visualize temperature profiles and heat island effects as functions of urban development. The extra four bands of our eight-band imagery from WorldView-2 provide increased opportunities for visualization and extraction of intricate features present in the data.

Using high-resolution imagery and subpixel analysis (in conjunction with habitat modeling), Allison Howard’s work has implications for predicting daily movement patterns of all mobile animals. Her research links species occurrence or animal behavior with environmental variables which represent significant improvements to previous attempts.

The winners, Mehta and Howard, will have the opportunity to present their research at the ASPRS Conference in Sacramento, CA on March 22nd and their research papers will be posted to digitalglobe.com in the upcoming weeks.