Using TOPS to identify host hot spots for rust incursion management

John Weiss attended the 2010 Ecological Society of Australia Conference as a CRCNPB representative to present an oral presentation of the paper entitled 'Using TOPS to identify host hot spots for rust incursion management'.

The conference is the premier ecology conference in Australia and John's paper was presented on the fourth day of the five day conference in the “Invasive species” concurrent session. The paper was the only paper presented at the conference in which the CRCNPB was the lead agency.

While attending the conference John held meetings with other modellers working on species distribution and discussed the use of presence/absence/pseudo absence data as well as different analysis tools such as boosted regression trees. This helped John confirm that his method of analysis is suitable and direct where he can further investigate correlations between abundance and remote sensing data.

John also networked with representatives of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) who are also building linkages with NASA’s Earth Observation Team and discussed the availability of MODIS and TOPS data for Australia.