Environmental Modeling and Visualization

About This Cluster

The Environmental Modeling and Visualization group applies geospatial techniques, 3D and 4D scientific visualization and modeling techniques to conduct regional climate modeling, epidemiological modeling, seismic oceanography and shallow geophysical profiling, conduct simulations of ecosystem structure, function and health, hydrodynamic modeling of water flow, movement of magma in volcanic systems, geochemical fate modeling, sediment and contaminant transport in fluvial and coastal systems, modeling of urban systems using spatial analysis. Our faculty study deterministic and stochastic dynamical systems, fluid mechanics, and design of mobile sensing arrays and platforms, analyze the effects of environmental management technologies, and design scientific data infrastructure mobile apps to engage citizen scientists.

Participating Faculty

Clement Alo profile photo

Clement Alo

Chairperson, Earth and Environmental Studies

Phone
973-655-7579
Email
aloc@montclair.edu
Lora Billings profile photo

Lora Billings

Dean, College of Science and Mathematics

Phone
973-655-5108
Email
billingsl@montclair.edu
Huan Feng profile photo

Huan Feng

Professor, Earth and Environmental Studies

Phone
973-655-7549
Email
fengh@montclair.edu
Eric Forgoston profile photo

Eric Forgoston

Professor, School of Computing

Phone
973-655-7242
Email
forgostone@montclair.edu
Katherine Herbert profile photo

Katherine Herbert

Professor, School of Computing

Phone
973-655-5398
Email
herbertk@montclair.edu
Jorge Lorenzo Trueba profile photo

Jorge Lorenzo Trueba

Professor, Earth and Environmental Studies

Phone
973-655-5320
Email
lorenzotruej@montclair.edu
Duke Ophori profile photo

Duke Ophori

Professor, Earth and Environmental Studies

Phone
973-655-7558
Email
ophorid@montclair.edu
Stefan Robila profile photo

Stefan Robila

Professor, School of Computing

Phone
973-655-4230
Email
robilas@montclair.edu
Aparna Varde profile photo

Aparna Varde

Associate Professor, School of Computing

Phone
973-655-4292
Email
vardea@montclair.edu
Danlin Yu profile photo

Danlin Yu

Professor, Earth and Environmental Studies

Phone
973-655-4313
Email
yud@montclair.edu
Research Grants
  • Forgoston, E., (PI). “RUI: Transport of Inertial Particles in Time-Dependent and Stochastic Flows, National Science Foundation, Award Number DMS-1418956 ” 2014 – 2018.
  • Yu, D. (PI). “Connect to Walk” GIS and mapping service for the Morris County Park Commission contract, Morris Park Alliance, 2016.
  • Forgoston, E., (PI). “Collaborative Research: Improved Vehicle Autonomy in Geophysical Flows,” National Science Foundation, 2015-2018.
  • Lorenzo-Trueba, J. (co-PI). “Collaborative Research: Integrated Field and Modeling Investigation of Coupled Barrier-Backbarrier System Responses to Long-Term Coastal Change,” National Science Foundation, 2015-2019.
Faculty and Student Publications

* indicates a Montclair State University student author or program alumnus

  • *Burli, P., Forgoston, E., Lal, P., Billings, L., and Wolde, B., (2017) Adoption of switchgrass cultivation for biofuel under uncertainty: A discrete-time modeling approach, Biomass & Bioenergy, 105, 107-115.
  • Lorenzo-Trueba, J., Mariotti, G. Chasing boundaries and cascade effects in a coupled barrier-marsh-lagoon system (2017) Geomorphology, 290, 153-163.
  • Moran, K.E., Nittrouer, J.A., Perillo, M.M., Lorenzo-Trueba, J., Anderson, J.B. Morphodynamic modeling of fluvial channel fill and avulsion time scales during early Holocene transgression, as substantiated by the incised valley stratigraphy of the Trinity River, Texas (2017) Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 122 (1), 215-234.
  • *Nieddu, G., Billings, L., Kaufman, J.H., Forgoston, E., and Bianco, S. (2017) Extinction Pathways and Outbreak Vulnerability in a Stochastic Ebola Model, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 14: 20160847.
  • Bauver, M., Forgoston, E., Billings, L. Computing the optimal path in stochastic dynamical systems CHAOS 26, 083101 (2016) Chaos, 26 (8), art. no. 083101.
  • Blacic, T.M., Jun, H., *Rosado, H., Shin, C. Smooth 2-D ocean sound speed from Laplace and Laplace-Fourier domain inversion of seismic oceanography data (2016) Geophysical Research Letters, 43 (3), pp. 1211-1218.
  • De Melo, G., Kacimi, M., Varde, A.S. Dissertation research problems in data management and related areas (2015) SIGMOD Record, 44 (4), pp. 53-56.
  • Ding, J.L., Yu, D., 2014. Monitoring and Evaluating spatial variability of soil salinity in dry and wet seasons in the Werigan-Kuqa Oasis, China, using remote sensing and electromagnetic induction instruments. Geoderma, 316 – 322
  • Ding, J., and Yu, D., 2015. Studies of spatiotemporal changes of land use/land cover and landscape patterns in a typical Turkmenistan oasis, Journal of Arid Land.
  • *Du, X., Emebo, O., Varde, A., Tandon, N., Chowdhury, S.N., Weikum, G. Air quality assessment from social media and structured data: Pollutants and health impacts in urban planning (2016) 2016 IEEE 32nd International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops, ICDEW 2016, art. no. 7495616, pp. 54-59.
  • *Du, X., Varde, A.S. Mining PM2.5 and traffic conditions for air quality (2016) 2016 7th International Conference on Information and Communication Systems, ICICS 2016, art. no. 7476082, pp. 33-38.
  • *Ferdinand, V.A. and Yu, D., 2015. Sustainable Urban Redevelopment: Assessing the Impact of Third-Party Rating Systems, Journal of Urban Planning and Development, DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)UP.1943-5444.0000271.
  • Fails, J.A., Herbert, K.G., Hill, E., Loeschorn, C., Kordecki, S., Dymko, D., DeStefano, A., Christian, Z. GeoTagger: A collaborative and participatory environmental inquiry system (2014) Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW, pp. 157-160.
  • Fails, J.A., Herbert, K., Hill, E., De Stefano, A., Hesse, B., Cushman, P., Gant, T., Shah, S., Abreu-Cruz, A., Panchariya, N., Nimbagal, V. Geotagger: A collaborative environmental inquiry platform (2015) 2015 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems, CTS 2015, art. no. 7210453, pp. 383-390.
  • Forgoston, E., Shaw, L.B., Schwartz, I.B. A Framework for Inferring Unobserved Multistrain Epidemic Subpopulations Using Synchronization Dynamics (2015) Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 77 (7), pp. 1437-1455.
  • Herbert, K.G., Hill, E., Fails, J.A., Ajala, J.O., Boniface, R.T., Cushman, P.W. Scientific data infrastructure for sustainability science mobile applications (2014) Proceedings – 2014 IEEE International Congress on Big Data, BigData Congress 2014, art. no. 6906874, pp. 804-805.
  • Hsieh, M.A., Mallory, K., Forgoston, E., Schwartz, I.B. Distributed allocation of mobile sensing agents in geophysical flows (2014) Proceedings of the American Control Conference, art. no. 6859084, pp. 165-171.
  • *Justus, F.K. Coupled effects on Kenyan horticulture following the 2008/2009 post-election violence and the 2010 volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajökull (2015) Natural Hazards, 76 (2), pp. 1205-1218.
  • Liu, Y., Meng, X.Y., Liu, Z.H. and Yu, D. 2015. Study on the Accumulated Temperature Distribution Model of Snowmelt Flood Magnitude from the Perspective of Ecological Environmental Protection of Mountain Areas. Natural Environment and Pollution Technology. 14(3): 517 – 524.
  • Lorenzo-Trueba, J. and Ashton, A.D. (2014), Rollover, drowning, and discontinuous retreat: distinct modes of barrier response to sea-level rise arising from a simple morphodynamic model, Journal of Geophysical Research-Earth Surface. doi: 10.1002/2013JF002941.
  • Melendez, A., Sanders, W., Smullyan, B., Uddin, A., Herbert, K.G. A mobile tool for collecting scientific experimental data (2015) ISEC 2015 – 5th IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference, art. no. 7119906, pp. 135-137.
  • Meng, X.Y., Yu, D., Liu, Z. 2015. Comparing mountain snowmelt and runoff simulations using temperature-index method and energy balance-based method within SWAT in Juntanghu watershed, Xinjiang, China. Journal of Mountain Science, 12(2): 368 – 381, DOI: 10.1007/s11629-014-3081-6.
  • Michini, M., Hsieh, M.A., Forgoston, E., Schwartz, I.B. Experimental validation of robotic manifold tracking in gyre-like flows (2014) IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, art. no. 6942874, pp. 2306-2311.
  • Michini, M., Hsieh, M.A., Forgoston, E., Schwartz, I.B. Robotic tracking of coherent structures in flows (2014) IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 30 (3), art. no. 6709670, pp. 593-603.
  • *Muriithi, F. and Yu, D. 2015. Understanding the Impact of Intensive Horticulture Land-Use Practices on Surface Water Quality in Central Kenya. Environments, 2, 521-545, doi: 10.3390/environments2040521
  • *Muriithi, F.K., Yu, D., Robila, S. Vegetation response to intensive commercial horticulture and environmental changes within watersheds in central highlands, Kenya, using AVHRR NDVI data (2016) GIScience and Remote Sensing, 53 (1), pp. 1-21.
  • *Nieddu, G., Billings, L., Forgoston, E. Analysis and Control of Pre-extinction Dynamics in Stochastic Populations (2014) Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 76 (12), pp. 3122-3137.
  • Panchariya, N.S., Destefano, A.J., Nimbagal, V., Ragupathy, R., Yavuz, S., Herbert, K.G., Hill, E., Fails, J.A. Current developments in big data and sustainability sciences in mobile citizen science applications (2015) Proceedings – 2015 IEEE 1st International Conference on Big Data Computing Service and Applications, BigDataService 2015, art. no. 7184882, pp. 202-212.
  • Varde, A., Rundensteiner, E., Fahrenholz, S. XML based markup languages for specific domains (2015) Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing, 46, pp. 215-238.
  • Yidana, S.M., Alo, C., Addai, M.O., Fynn, O.F., Essel, S.K. Numerical analysis of groundwater flow and potential in parts of a crystalline aquifer system in Northern Ghana (2015) International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, 12 (12), pp. 3805-3818.