Posted April 30, 2007

Dr. Yongxin Deng.Dr. Yongxin Deng, was chosen to receive the 2007 College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Faculty Award for Research. Dr. Deng will be recognized at the Arts & Sciences Spring Awards Ceremony on April 30

Dr. Deng has published five peer-reviewed articles in international-level academic journals, with two more accepted for publication March 27, 2007. He has co-authored two book chapters, and has given five conference presentations, including co-presenting the keynote presentation at the International Symposium on Terrain Analysis and Digital Terrain Modeling in Nanjing, China.

Dr. Deng is rapidly emerging as an internationally recognized expert and paradigm builder in the field of digital terrain analysis. Specifically related to this emergence, he has:

  1. Authored (as the first author) the “terrain analysis” chapter for Handbook of Geographic Information Science (2007), whose chapter authors are disciplinary or sub-disciplinary academic leaders in Geographic Information Science.
  2. Co-authored the “terrain analysis” entry for Encyclopedia of Geographic Information Science, another major GIS tool-book that is currently in press.
  3. Co-authored the keynote speech (and article) for First International Symposium on Terrain Analysis and Digital Terrain Modeling.
  4. Authored a review paper defining recent paradigm evolution of digital terrain analysis. This paper, for the first time in the literature, evaluates digital terrain analysis progresses in the past 10+ years primarily from an ontological perspective, and secondarily from a methodological perspective. The paper will be sent to the peer-reviewed international journal Progress in Physical Geography for publication.

Dr. Deng’s recent research has made outstanding scientific contributions to the GIS (Geographic Information Science) community. This statement can be evaluated from the following five perspectives:

    • His work addressed the difficult but fundamental topic of “scale” in GIS and geography. He defined how environmental variables and their relationships may vary with scale in a terrain analysis context, and how such variability is landscape dependent. The research findings can guide future efforts in approaching the scale issue in a wider GIS and environmental modeling community. This part of research is published in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science (the leading international journal in the field of GIS) and Remote Sensing of Environment (the leading international journal in the field of remote sensing).
    • His work in mapping mountain peaks described an approach that can combine four difficult characteristics of many geographic objects: their boundaries may be fuzzy, their internal contents may not be homogeneous, their definitions may be uncertain because people use different criteria, and their existence is of multiple spatial scales. These difficulties have rarely been addressed in the same study, which make this work valuable for the mapping of not only peaks, but also other geographic objects and concepts. This work was just accepted for publication by the International Journal of Geographical Information Science.
    • His recent research addressed a few issues that are fundamental for the understanding of vegetation-topography relations: scale dependency, seasonal variability, and importance of observing individual properties. He took a multi-scale and property-specific approach to define the role of mountain topography in the formation and seasonal change of vegetation patterns. This study is special for three reasons. Firstly, it—for the first time in the literature—defined how the topography effect on vegetation may shift with seasons (this role has usually been taken as static in previous understandings). Secondly, it found that studying individual plant and topographic properties was a better way of observing many of the topography-vegetation relationships, different from the conventional way of studying vegetation composition and species distributions. And thirdly, he found that the topography-vegetation correlations are more obvious at coarse spatial scales, and a multi-scale and across-scale approach should be employed. This part of work was published in Remote Sensing of Environment and presented at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers.
    • He is the first person that explicitly evaluated the subjective factor in selecting attributes and assigning attribute weights for environmental analysis. This part of research has been published in Annals of Association of American Geographers, the flagship journal in the discipline of Geography with the widest geography readerships, and on Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, a major international journal in geomorphology.
    • Dr. Deng’s recent research efforts have been in constructing linkages between environmental properties that are described in different disciplines. This can be represented by the completion of a recent study (and manuscript) that extended the observed vegetation-topography relationships to the definition of the thermal south (which is not geographic south in most places) in mountains. This research necessarily spans between terrain analysis, vegetation science, and climatology, and will be sent to Agricultural and Forest Meteorology for publication consideration.

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