Program Highlights & News

Highlights Review 2011 Research & Study Abroad Program on Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Panama

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Panama City, Panama. November 2, 2011 --- On Friday, October 28th, 2011 the University of Alabama in Huntsville invited the university community including students, profesors, local corporations, and special guests, to a highlights review of the 2011 UAHuntsville/CATHALAC Research & Study Abroad Program on Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Program offers graduate and undergraduate students a combination of professional training, hands-on learning, research opportunities, and cultural immersion. The event took place at the Shelby Center for Science and Technology where students displayed posters showing the results of their research carried out during summer 2011 in Panama.

Brad Barrick and Melanie Gates, UAHuntsville students, worked on: Analyzing Taboga Island’s Water Shortage. “Our research involved outlining Taboga Island’s vulnerability to climate change and determining the island’s capacity for rainwater harvesting. We hope to provide local decision makers with the knowledge they need to plan for future water availability. Our findings suggest that Taboga’s water problem could be alleviated in the short term with the implementation of rainwater harvesting on a large scale. However, our research also suggests that as the century progresses, Taboga is likely to receive decreased precipitation in response to changes in climate. With that in mind, further research into methods of securing water for the island must be conducted in order to assure sustainability in the future”, said the research group.

Chris Jahnig and Natasha Wood from UBC, Canada and Samantha Zabodyn from the University of Texas at Austin worked on: Extreme Weather Events and Vulnerable Communities in Eastern Panama. This project analyzes the vulnerability of both an indigenous and non-indigenous community in the Bayano River Watershed to extreme weather events such as flooding, that may produce several damages to these communities. "The study of communities in Lago Bayano will strive to channel political and technical efforts towards highly vulnerable areas through their identification using a comparative qualitative and quantitative assessment, and secondly it seeks to build a foundation for future policy and structural changes by considering the distinct capacities for adaptation in each individual community", said the research team.

Tara Martin, Tiffany Webb, and Samuel Ayers, UAHuntsville students, worke

d on: Climate Change Impacts on Agricultural Production in Central Panama. This project analyzes environmental variables such as daily temperature range and solar radiation that may affect sugar production in the Santa Rosa sugar factory, located in Aguadulce District in the Cocle Province. “Our project consists of finding free, available satellite images, combining those images with a variety of data, and analyzing this information using GIS. With this data, the engineers at Ingenio Santa Rosa can analyze past images and make significant correlations that will improve their means of production in the future. We hope that with this new method of sustainable practices, Ingenio Santa Rosa will become a positive example of precision agriculture in Central America”, said the research team.
Casey Calamaio from UAHuntsville worked on: The Challenge of Saccharum spontaneum in the Canal Watershed. “Geospatially identifying the invasive species Saccharum spontaneum, or Paja Canalera, to derive spectral libraries in multispectral, hyperspectral, and radar datatsets provides the necessary information for vegetation indices. The objectives for this Summer's research was twofold: 1. To develop a methodology to spectrally detect Saccharum spontaneum from satellite images and, 2) to perform a general land cover classification on PALSAR imagery which can then be used for future studies”, said Calamaio.