About
Born and raised in Bucharest I started my trip around the world at 14 when I moved north to study forestry within a specialized high school program followed by a BS in Forest Management. Once task accomplished, nine years later, I returned home working as an engineer at the Forest Research and Management Institute. During this period I have also enhanced my education with a bachelor in economics.
Five years later I have decided to follow a Masters program at the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania (Greece). This brought a change to my career which afterwards focused on remote sensing applications for forest management. Following the master, I went for a PhD degree at the University of Saragossa (Spain). A postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Melbourne set me adrift towards the end of the world, where I remained for several years, together with my dear companions Cris, Oscar, Marcos and Diego.
As a good forester I like trekking, camping, and generally all kind of outdoors activities. I also like learning new things and taking on new challenges. For any doubt, curiosity or suggestion contact me.
Research interests
Natural hazards
My interests are focused on pre- and post-fire forest management and the use of remote sensing for landscape scale assessment of fuel type, fuel load, fire effects and live fuels moisture content. I am using a variety of remote sensing sensors from high resolution optical to synthetic aperture radar and airborne laser scanning. I have developed new methods based on SAR for estimating fire severity and forest regrowth in a range of environments. The pioneering nature of this effort resulted in the publication of several articles one of which was awarded the Interactive Prize Paper Award by the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society. I have also demonstrated the utility of SAR data for the retrieval of live canopy moisture content which is relevant for fire risk evaluation. I have proposed the use of a novel index, the standardized Radar Burn Ratio, for the estimation of fire severity without the need for a priori information from field campaigns.
Carbon cycling
I am interested in airborne and space-borne radar data to understand the main factors influencing forest biomass quantification errors. My work focuses on improving biomass estimation accuracy from dense multi-temporal series and advanced radar techniques such as polarimetry and interferometry. I have also worked on enhancing existing backscatter models with a priori forest structural information obtained from lidar sensors.
Environmental change
I am also interested in broad scale changes of land use land cover types with an emphasis on forest change caused by natural disasters or the anthropic influence. I am using a range of methods and sensors such as object and pixel based classification techniques, change detection, and trajectory analysis as well as a range of sensors from high and very high spatial resolution optical satellite images to synthetic aperture radar and their synergy.
Education
Thesis: “Radar Sensitivity to Burn Severity and Forest Recovery in Mediterranean Environments – backscatter and interferometric coherence analysis”.
Earlier degrees
Employment
Research on environmental monitoring from Earth Observation data sets; project scoping, personnel recruitment, team management, algorithm development.
Research on environmental monitoring from Earth Observation data sets; project scoping, personnel recruitment, team management, algorithm development. Co-lead of Task 4.2 of the ECOPOTENTIAL project, retrieval of bio-geophysical variables from airborne and spaceborne data.
Earlier positions
Burned area mapping in the Amazon basin; led a multi-disciplinary team of six geographers and IT professionals.
Integrated monitoring of natural landscapes using active/passive satellite datasets; led a team of 22 technicians and engineers.
Victorian Transport Statistics Portal (VTSP) on-line database.
ARC DP 0984586 and SMAPEx projects: airborne survey planning; airborne radar signal processing; algorithm development for forest characterisation.
Project “Vegetation recovery and erosion in burned areas: integrated analysis of fire severity and environmental parameters using remote sensing and GIS”.
GEOLAND and FIRE PARADOX projects: land mapping from very high-resolution satellite imagery; collection of spectral signatures.
Team management; technical assistance for national and international in-situ forest monitoring networks.
Projects
29 funded projects since 2000, 16 of them as lead investigator.
Current
Lead Investigator (PI)
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Past
Show all 26 past grants
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Researcher
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Lead Investigator (PI)
WP2100 lead
Lead Investigator
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Research team member
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Consultant, Task 4.2
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Super Science Research fellow
Research assistant
Research fellow
Research assistant
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Engineer / Researcher
Publications
Most cited
Most recent
First author
Contact
mihai.tanase [at] inia.csic.es
ICIFOR (INIA – CSIC), Madrid, Spain
