Remote Sensing Specialist (Associate Specialist)

The Environmental Market Solutions Lab (emLab) is an interdisciplinary team of scientists based at UC Santa Barbara dedicated to bringing market-based solutions to the world's most pressing environmental problems. emLab conducts cutting-edge research and develops innovative policy solutions related to oceans and fisheries, land and freshwater, climate and energy, and people and poverty.

Increasingly, many emLab research projects make use of remotely sensed data to identify causal relationships between policy, human behavior, and environmental outcomes. To support this growing body of research, emLab is seeking a highly motivated Specialist to compile, process, and analyze remotely sensed data. Research projects will include, but not be limited to, (1) the effect of financial incentives on the adoption of agricultural and land use outcomes including conservation farming, alternatives to field burning, and reforestation, (2) the cost and equity impacts of policies seeking to conserve forests, and (3) the environmental impacts of development interventions. Projects span a diversity of geographies, including Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia.

The Remote Sensing Specialist will be responsible for a variety of tasks, including, but not limited to:

• Identifying appropriate remote sensing datasets and methods to produce accurate measurements of environmental conditions such as land use and agricultural practices;
• Overseeing the collection and refining of training datasets;
• Developing efficient and reproducible workflows to implement best practices for data acquisition, pre-processing, and analysis;
• Collaborating with environmental economists to analyze remotely sensed outcomes in experimental and quasi-experimental settings.

The successful candidate will have strong quantitative skills, a creative and solutions-oriented mindset, and the ability to effectively communicate scientific results to stakeholders, scientists, and policymakers.

For primary consideration apply by November 2, 2020.