G. Burch Fisher

Dr. Fisher is an earth systems scientist interested in how landscapes and environments evolve with respect to a range of dynamic forcings, including climate, tectonics, organisms, hydrocarbons, and humans. To this end, he has worked on problems spanning a wide range of spatial domains from zebrafish retinas to the Himalaya and at timescales ranging from days to millions of years. His work utilizes a diverse array of geospatial, machine learning, computational, geochemical, mineralogical, and sensor based toolsets to inform a broad range of problems. Recent collaborations have focused on using machine learning to predict forest harvest activity and bird habitat from large-scale airborne LiDAR data, quantifying tree phenology behavior using remote sensing datasets, deciphering climate-erosion-tectonic interactions from topography and foreland sedimentary archives, algorithm development to automate the quantification of retinal regeneration in zebrafish, and spatial analysis and hydrocarbon forensics applied to large oil spill events (Deepwater Horizon, MC20, etc). Dr. Fisher earned a BA in Geology from Middlebury College, a MS in Earth Science from Dartmouth College, a PhD in Earth Science from UC Santa Barbara, and was a Jackson Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and independent consultant before joining UMCES.