Jamon Van Den Hoek

Oregon State University | OSU · College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences

In 2015, 193 countries declared their commitment to "leave no one behind" in pursuit of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the world's refugees have been routinely excluded from national censuses and representative surveys, and, as a result, have broadly been overlooked in SDG evaluations. In this study, we examine the potential of O...

Satellite-based broad-scale (i.e., global and continental) human settlement data are essential for diverse applications spanning climate hazard mitigation, sustainable development monitoring, spatial epidemiology and demographic modeling. Many human settlement products report exceptional detection accuracies above 85%, but there is a substantial bl...

As of this writing, there are 26 million refugees under UN mandate in 134 countries who have fled war and political persecution, with 10% living in UNHCR-managed refugee camps. The average stay in a refugee camp is more than ten years, and more than two-thirds of refugees live in a “protracted refugee scenario,” defined by the UNHCR as a situation...

Very‐high resolution (VHR) satellite imagery is increasingly used to visualize the effects of armed conflicts in near‐real time. Yet these data, typically commercial, are generally released selectively or for a fee, impeding scientific and humanitarian applications. Such images also tend to focus on cities or infrastructure, obscuring the effects o...

Anticipatory disaster risk reduction (DRR) is an essential human right for the ~1 billion people living in informal settlements who are disproportionately exposed to climate-related hazards due to their high vulnerability. Participatory approaches are recognized as being critical for effective and sustainable disaster prevention, mitigation, and pr...

Plain Language Summary Earth observation (EO) data are used to understand the social, environmental, and climatic causes and consequences of changes to the Earth. Greater diversity in EO data sources and access points, the evolution of web‐based and collaborative platforms for analysis and communication, and the growth of the global user community...

As seen in the recent war in Ukraine and earlier wars and crises within the past decade in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Venezuela the management of migration remains urgent, complex and sensitive policy question. The recent floods in Pakistan have also demonstrated how internal displacement from natural disasters can cause acute resource str...

This study presents a novel approach to systematically measure climatic and environmental exposure in refugee camps using remote sensing and geospatial data. Using a case study of seventeen refugee camps across five countries in East Africa, we develop a climatic and environmental exposure index to quantify each camp’s exposure relative to a popula...

Illicit cattle ranching and coca farming have serious negative consequences on the Colombian Amazon’s land systems. The underlying causes of these land activities include historical processes of colonization, armed conflict, and narco-trafficking. We aim to examine how illicit cattle ranching and coca farming are driving forest cover change over th...

Research has shown an increasing trend in attempts to integrate social and ecological data that use indicators to improve quality of life. This includes understanding people’s beliefs about environmental governance. Understanding patterns in beliefs of environmental governance can be a powerful way to help policy makers take informed actions that m...

By the end of 2020, 20.7 million refugees worldwide were under the protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Despite the intended role of refugee camps as sanctuaries for people fleeing conflict and persecution, recent empirical research has shown that many refugees continue to experience conflict even after settling...

This chapter provides a geospatial review of the empirical research on the link between migration and water stress in Asia. Despite Asia’s large landmass, populous countries and diverse cultures and environments, water stress has widely contributed to migration across the region. What generalities can be made? One of the most compelling findings em...

Satellite imagery has been widely used to map urbanization processes. To address the urgent need for urban landscape mapping that goes beyond urban footprint analysis, the local climate zone (LCZ) scheme has been increasingly used to reveal the urban forms and functions important to urban heat islands and micro-climates across the globe. As with mo...

Nepal has experienced rapid transitions in forest and agricultural practices over the last several decades. This study compares surveys of forest cover, land use, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of six sites in Sindhu Kabhre and Palanchok Districts conducted in 1992 and 2017. We correlated these transformations with changes in forest...

The global refugee population has never been as large as it is today with at least 26 million refugees living in over 100 countries. Refugee settlements are often thought to be a temporary solution, however refugees typically remain in asylum for over a decade. Despite their large population and lengthy residence, refugees are routinely excluded fr...

The study of land change within social-ecological systems (SES) is of great interest and increasingly makes uses of remote sensing (RS) imagery to scale inferences up through space and time. However, spatial analysis using dense time series of RS data poses technical hurdles for non-expert users. To broaden the community of SES researchers using RS...

Widespread, repeat damage within cities is a hallmark of modern and increasingly urbanized warfare. Multitemporal satellite remote sensing is well suited for monitoring urban conflict damage patterns, providing unique and actionable insights for protecting civilians, guiding humanitarian response and relief, and identifying affected infrastructure...

Satellite-based broad-scale (i.e., global and continental) human settlement data offer foun-dational information for diverse applications spanning climate hazard mitigation, sustainable development monitoring, spatial epidemiology, and demographic modeling. While many human settlement products report exceptional detection accuracies above 85%, ther...

Negative environmental impacts of violent conflict have been observed worldwide. Whether or not active global conflicts are declining in number remains hotly debated, the number of countries entering post-conflict periods is on the rise, and the impact of this transition on land cover changes remains poorly understood. In Colombia, though large-sca...

Wickramarathna S., Van Den Hoek J., Strimbu B.M., 2021. Automated detection of individual juniper tree location and forest cover changes using Google Earth Engine. Ann. For. Res. 64(1): 61-72. Abstract Tree detection is the first step in the appraisal of a forest, especially when the focus is monitoring the growth of tree canopy. The acquisition of...

Accurate remote sensing of mountainous forest cover change is important for myriad social and ecological reasons, but is challenged by topographic and illumination conditions that can affect detection of forests. Several topographic illumination correction (TIC) approaches have been developed to mitigate these effects, but existing research has foc...

Since 2015, the global refugee population has risen precipitously, reaching a record 26 million people across 135 countries. Forcibly displaced due to violent conflict and political persecution, refugees seek asylum and security abroad but have often found highly restrictive conditions. Refugee camps are often established in marginal borderlands, a...

Climate change and attendant weather events are global phenomena with wide-ranging implications for migration and health. We argue that while these issues are inherently interrelated, little empirical or policy attention has been given to the three-way nexus between climate vulnerability, migration, and health. In this Review, we develop a conceptu...

Knowledge coproduction that draws on local and scientific knowledge presents opportunities for more holistic understanding of environmental change. We describe our use of a multiple-evidence based approach to investigate the causes and consequences of environmental change in a community-protected grassland and its surrounding landscape in the Ethio...

The recent adoption of the Global Compact on Refugees formally recognizes not only the importance of supporting the nearly 26 million people who have sought asylum from conflict and persecution but also of easing the pressures on receiving areas and host countries. However, few countries may enforce the Compact out of concern over the economic or e...

River impoundments strongly modify the global water cycle and terrestrial water storage (TWS) variability. Given the susceptibility of global water cycle to climate change and anthropogenic influence, the synthesis of science with sustainable reservoir operation strategy is required as part of an integrated approach to water management. Here, we ta...

In November 2016, after 52 years of armed conflict, the Colombian government and the primary rebel group, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) reached a peace agreement. The agreement incorporated three changes to institutions governing forest land occupation and use: (a) the demobilization of FARC from forested places, (2) the fu...

In 1998, the National Research Council published People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science. The volume focused on emerging research linking changes in human populations and land use/land cover to shed light on issues of sustainability, human livelihoods, and conservation, and led to practical innovations in agricultural planning,...

Since the 1980s, Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world, has gained worldwide recognition for its successful community forestry program. Researchers, however, have not previously documented the spatially explicit impacts of this forest transition because of the topographic effects, e.g., shading, clouds, snow, and ice, hindered remote-sen...

Plain Language Summary Studies of climate change impacts on lakes typically consider projections of air temperature over time. Such studies have demonstrated that a warming world will have numerous repercussions for lake ecosystems. Climate, however, is much more than temperature. In lakes, changes in near‐surface wind speed play an important role....

In 2015, the United Nations introduced 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 associated targets as part of its 2030 Agenda. One hundred and ninety three countries declared their commitment to "leave no one behind" in the shared pursuit of SDGs, yet 250 million people around the globe are estimated to be missing from SDG progress assessmen...

In mountainous regions slope and aspect result in variations in the illumination condition and the same land cover type can therefore show differences in the reflectance depending on the orientation of the terrain slope towards the sun and the sensor of the satellite. Different topographic illumination correction methods exist and their performance...

In this study, we use a lake model to assess the influence of atmospheric stilling, the decrease in near-surface wind speed, on lake thermal dynamics across the Northern Hemisphere. For 650 lakes we investigate how atmospheric stilling has influenced lake surface and bottom water temperature, lake thermal stability, and the duration of thermal stra...

Tropical reservoirs are critical infrastructure for managing drinking and irrigation water and generating hydroelectric power. However, long-term spaceborne monitoring of reservoir storage is challenged by data scarcity from near-persistent cloud cover and drought, which may reduce volumes below those in the observational record. In evaluating our...

Human-elephant conflict is a major conservation concern in elephant range countries. A variety of management strategies have been developed and are practiced at different scales for preventing and mitigating human-elephant conflict. However, human-elephant conflict remains pervasive as the majority of existing prevention strategies are driven by si...

Although previous studies suggest that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from reservoir sediment exposed to the atmosphere during drought may be substantial, this process has not been rigorously quantified. Here we determined carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions from sediment cores exposed to a drying and rewetting cycle. We found a strong...

The Colombian Andes foothills have seen an expansion of forest disturbance since the 1950s. While understanding the drivers of disturbance is important for quantifying the implications of land use change on regional biodiversity, methods for attributing disturbance to specific drivers of change at a high temporal and spatial resolution are still la...

This report assesses and maps 184 peer-reviewed, empirical research articles selected for their focus on linkages between water stress and human migration. First and most importantly, this literature asserts that migration is universal. Migration is an extremely common social process and is normal in almost every society on earth. Moreover, migrati...

This paper examines the linkages between Boko Haram activities in northeastern Nigeria and declined activities in regional agricultural markets. Building on data from both the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), the paper first considers the geographic distribution of Boko...

Stereogrammetry applied to globally available high resolution spaceborne imagery (HRSI; < 5 m spatial resolution) yields fine-scaled digital surface models (DSMs) of elevation. These DSMs may represent elevations that range from the ground to the vegetation canopy surface, are produced from stereoscopic image pairs (stereopairs) that have a variety...

The spatial distribution of disturbances in Andean tropical forests and protected areas has commonly been calculated using bi or tri-temporal analysis because of persistent cloud cover and complex topography. Long-term trends of vegetative decline (browning) or improvement (greening) have thus not been evaluated despite their importance for assessi...

The socio-ecological impacts of large scale resource extraction are frequently underreported in underdeveloped regions. The open-pit Grasberg mine in Papua, Indonesia, is one of the world’s largest copper and gold extraction operations. Grasberg mine tailings are discharged into the lowland Ajkwa River deposition area (ADA) leading to forest inunda...

In this report, Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture, a research team based at Goldsmiths, University of London, provide a detailed reconstruction of the events in Rafah from 1 August until 4 August 2014, when a ceasefire came into effect. The report examines the Israeli army’s response to the capture of Lieutenant Hadar Goldin and its i...

Context: The National Forest Protection Program (NFPP) and sloping land conversion program (SLCP) were introduced in 1998 and 2000, respectively, with the shared goal of increasing forest cover and decreasing forest loss across China. The NFPP banned commercial logging and funded tree planting efforts while the SLCP subsidized tree planting on stee...

Changes in water temperatures resulting from climate warming can alter the structure and function of aquatic ecosystems. Lake-specific physical characteristics may play a role in mediating individual lake responses to climate. Past mechanistic studies of lake–climate interactions have simulated generic lake classes at large spatial scales or perfor...

China's Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP) and Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP), introduced in 1998 and 1999, respectively, are integral parts of the world's largest reforestation effort. State-reported forest cover data indicate effective policy implementation through net forest cover expansion but overlook the scale-dependence of and...

Interest in collaborative research on Chinese social and ecological systems has grown dramatically in recent decades. While international researchers are giving increased attention to China, foreign scholars, especially those new to China, are often unsure of the best way to find collaborators, garner sponsorship, and pursue research goals. Underst...

In reaction to devastating floods on the Yangtze River in the summer of 1998, the Chinese Central Government introduced a logging ban as part of the Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP) with the goal of dramatically increasing national forest cover. Since then, over 11 billion USD has been allocated to the program, but the NFPP's success at pro...

We present two interactive, online maps of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus: The University of Wisconsin-Madison Interactive Campus Map (http://map.wisc.edu) and the Lakeshore Nature Preserve Interactive Map (http://www.lakeshorepreserve.wisc.edu). Although these two projects represent the same university campus, the former follows a wayf...