Michael Routhier is an instructor, program coordinator, and creator of the Geospatial Science Graduate Certificate program at the University of New Hampshire as well as the director of the Geospatial Science Center (GSSC) in Earth Systems Research Center (ESRC) at the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS). His technical specializations include, Geographic Information Systems, Web Mapping, Data Archiving, Remote Sensing, Digital Image Processing, and Geospatial Science Education. His scientific interests are within Earth Systems Science and Geography with particular interest in land use and land cover change detection and analysis, coastal resilience, and sea level rise studies.
As part of his responsibilities as an instructor, Michael teaches GSS 800 Elements of Geospatial Science, GSS 805 Applied Geographic Information Systems for Research, GSS 807 Geographic Information Systems for Earth and Environmental Science, and CIE 896 Geographic Information Systems for Water Resources. Besides teaching non-credit and credit level classes for over twenty years at UNH he has also worked on multiple education and outreach efforts throughout his career. Some of these other efforts include mentoring undergraduate college students in summer research experience programs over the last several years. This includes working as an instructor during the summers of 2009 and 2010 within the NASA Summer Research Experience (SRE) program in Bismarck, ND. This program worked to promote GIS, remote sensing, and Earth Systems Science research and career skills to participating Native American Tribal College students. Additionally, Michael developed and coordinated the NASA funded University of New Hampshire Geospatial Science Educational Outreach GIS Day Conference and College Fair from 1998 until 2008 to excite hundreds of junior and senior level high school students annually about the many career and educational opportunities available to them within the Geospatial Sciences.
As part of his responsibilities as center manager, Michael provides Geo-Spatial Science project management and technical support to many funded research projects. He has been managing the GSSC at ESRC for over twenty years and his most recent work includes acting as the Cyber Infrastructure Team Technical Coordinator for New Hampshire EPSCoR Ecosystems & Society, Safe Beaches & Shellfish, and the Future of Dams projects . Some of his other recent work includes the mapping of salt marsh grasses species along the New Hampshire seacoast using UAV and satellite remote sensing to understand the effects of sea level rise on living shorelines. His previous work includes leading National Geographic Society funded work studying the effects of sea level rise in historic coastal Portsmouth New Hampshire, providing digital data archive support to the NASA Earth Science Federation Partners (ESiPS) EOS-WEBSTER project for terrestrial system research, providing geospatial analysis support to the UNH ESRC Water Systems Analysis Group for the study of macro-scale hydrology, providing programming support to the NSF, NZ IGNS, and USGS funded VALMAP geospatial data and map visualization system for the study of the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica, and providing remote sensing, digital image processing, and GIS support for the NASA funded Landsat Pathfinder Tropical Deforestation Project for the study of land cover change in the Legal Amazon Basin in Brazil and throughout Southeast Asia.
