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Max Cook is a graduate student working with Dr. Jennifer Balch in the Department of Geography. His work focuses on the social and ecological impacts of wildfires in the western United States. Specifically, he is interested in using "Big Data", including remote sensing, to understand the impacts of extreme fires and identify possible mitigation strategies for create fire-resilient communities. Max received his BS from Colorado State University in the Department of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship in Natural Resource Management and GIS. He has spent 5 years working with The Nature Conservancy in Colorado and Utah as a Geospatial Analyst, where he continues to work on applied conservation issues. In his free time, he is an avid angler, biker, and backcountry skier.

Fire Regimes and How They are Changing

Earth Lab takes a collaborative, big-data approach to answering some of our most pressing questions related to fire. We seek to understand what controls fire in the landscape, how fire is changing, and what this means for society.
Georgia fires

Integration of Diverse Datasets

At Earth Lab, we often use data from diverse sources to facilitate inquiry, from the more conventional remote sensing datasets such as multispectral satellite imagery and radar backscatter, airborne lidar data, and high-resolution UAV imagery, to the less traditional datasets such as social media feeds, housing layers, and event databases.
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Cook