EV1-215
dtrobinson@uwaterloo.ca
Derek joined the Department in 2012 with interests that lie at the center of land use, land management, and the carbon cycle. He uses agent-based modelling as an approach to integrate GIS, ecological, and human decision-making models to evaluate socio-economic contexts and policy scenarios on changes to land use and land cover, ecological function and the provision of ecosystem services, and human well-being.
For more information, visit Derek Robinson's personal website.
Key Areas of Graduate Supervision: Land-use and land-cover change, land-management and the carbon cycle, very-high resolution remote sensing optical and lidar systems, remotely piloted aircraft, tree reconstruction and carbon estimation (QSMs, in-situ), game engines for natural science.
Recent Courses Taught
GEOG/AVIA 270: Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems Knowledge Requirements
GEOG/PLAN 318: Spatial Analysis
GEOG/PLAN 381: Advanced Geographic Information Systems
GEOG/PLAN 481: Geographical Information Systems Project
GEMCC 630: Land Use and the Carbon Cycle (new)
Research Interests
The goal of my research program is to improve our understanding about highly integrated natural and human processes. Within the context of Land-System Science, I seek to understand how natural and human systems interact through feedback mechanisms and affect land management choices among humans and ecosystem (e.g., carbon storage) and biophysical processes (e.g., erosion) in natural systems. This research program comprises four components:
- Finding novel methods for data collection (e.g., remotely piloted aircraft) that can be used to calibrate and validate models of natural systems at the resolution of decision makers.
- Designing and constructing agent-based models to formalize our understanding of human decisions and their interaction with their environment in computer code.
- Coupling these two previous components together so that we may not only quantify the impact of representing their coupling, but more importantly to assess the impacts of changing climate, technology, and policy on human well-being, patterns of land use and land management, and ecological and biophysical aspects of our environment.
- Visualizing, exploring, interrogating, and sharing our data with collaborators and partners using game engines.
Recent Publications
- 2025. Direct estimation of forest aboveground biomass from UAV LiDAR and RGB observations in forest stands with various tree densities K So, J Chau, S Rudd, DT Robinson, J Chen, D Cyr, A Gonsamo Remote Sensing 17 (12), 2091
- 2025. Development of an agent-based First Nation land use voting model: Experiments in policy adoption at Curve Lake First Nation, Canada RA Fligg, DT Robinson Land Use Policy 151, 107463
- 2025. Nature’s role in residential development: Identifying leverage points for climate change planning in Ontario, Canada A Skoyles, M Drescher, DC Parker, DT Robinson Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 105, 128714
- 2025. Suppression efficacy of remotely piloted aircraft systems–based herbicide application on invasive Phragmites australis in wetlands GK Lew-Kowal, DT Robinson, JM Gilbert, RC Rooney Invasive Plant Science and Management 18, e18
- 2024. Individual tree species classification using low-density airborne multispectral LiDAR data via attribute-aware cross-branch transformer L Wang, D Lu, L Xu, DT Robinson, W Tan, Q Xie, H Guan, MA Chapman, Remote Sensing of Environment 315, 114456
- 2024. Automated Registration of Ground 3D Point Cloud Data for Individual Buildings H Weng, CM Yeum, DT Robinson, B Macvicar International Conference on Computing in Civil and Building Engineering, 626-639
- 2024. Efficient detection of ephemeral gully trajectories using topographic index-based approach: Calibration-free for large-scale applications H Mohebzadeh, A Biswas, B DeVries, R Rudra, DT Robinson, ... International Journal of Sediment Research 39 (4), 586-600
- 2024 Direct topsoil transfer to already planted reforestation sites increases native plant understory and not ruderal J Hamberg, DT Robinson, AJ Trant, PJ Richardson, SD Murphy Restoration Ecology 32 (3), e14076