ProfileI joined the School of Engineering and Applied Science in 2003, after 3 years as a software developer. My industrial work focussed on maintaining map data integrity and currency for field workers who may only have intermittent communication with a central GIS servers. As a lecturer at Aston, I engage extensively with schools and community groups and have received Excellence Awards for my teaching. Much of my research is interdisciplinary, involving, for example, collaborations with microbiologists, economists and town planners.
Having worked for the Birmingham Urban Wildlife Trust as a school leaver, I developed an interest in urban ecology and green corridors which led to a PhD on the spatial pattern and dispersal of plant species within the urban mosaic of remnant and emerging habitat fragments. Patch quality, geometry and isolation were modelled to compare the occupancy of available habitat to that predicted by metapopulation models. The thesis also identified apparent source-sink effects in the woodland herb Melampyrum pratense, within Sutton Park, Birmingham.
During this time I also completed an MSc in GIS at the University of Leicester, publishing my dissertation on sub-pixel classification methods for handling 'mixed pixels' in remotely-sensed imagery.
My first postdoctoral post was
on the EU-supported project FLIERS (Fuzzy
Land Information from Environmental
Remote Sensing) at the University
of Leicester,
concentrating on:
- generation of verification and training data through
vegetation survey, and some novel imagery manipulation and correction.
- creation of a visualisation toolkit to explore the
many data layers produced by fuzzy classifications. This toolkit was
written in Java, by myself and Jo
Wood, and can be downloaded and evaluated HERE.
Qualifications & Education
Employment
- 2004 – present: Lecturer, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Aston University
- 2001 – 2003: Senior Software Developer, Tadpole-Cartesia (now ESRI UK)
- 1999 – 2000: Lecturer in GIS, Nottingham University
- 1996-1999: Research Associate, FLIERS, University of Leicester
Teaching activity
- GS3007: Introduction to GIS
- EC304G: Spatial Data Management
- GS3005: Final year GIS/ Environmental Science projects
- CS2210: Web Development with Java.
- EM4010: MSc Quantitative Methods
Research interests
- INTAMAP: Web Processing Service approaches to automated interpolation for emergency mapping.
- Assessing the effects of real-world uncertainty on conservation planning tools. (in partnership with RMIT, Australia)
- Mapping and modelling of disease: e.g. spatio-temporal clustering of community-associated MRSA in the West Midlands.
- Interoperable exchange of data quality information (via XML schemas such as UncertML)
- Carbon/traffic impacts of transporting municipal waste to EfW (Energy from Waste) facilities.
Recent research fundingINTAMAP (EU FP6 STREP)
PhD SupervisionMatt Williams – co-supervised with Dan Cornford. Supporting interoperable interpolation: the INTAMAP approach.
I am happy to supervise PhD candidates, particularly in the field of spatial analysis for environmental and ecological applications.
Membership of Professional BodiesFellow of the Higher Education Academy
Selected publications
Refereed journal publications.
Bastin, L & Longden, D (in press, 2009) Comparing transport emissions and impacts for energy recovery from domestic waste (EfW): centralised and distributed disposal options for two UK Counties. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems.
Langford, B, Gordon, A & Bastin, L (in press, 2009) When do conservation planning methods deliver? Quantifying the consequences of uncertainty. Ecological Informatics.
Rollason, J , Bastin, L, Hilton, A , Pillay, D , Worthington, T , Mckeon, C, De, P , Burrows, K , Lambert, P (2008) Epidemiology of community-acquired meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus obtained from the UK West Midlands region. Journal of Hospital Infection, 70 (4): 314-20.
Bastin. L . , Rollason, J., Hilton, A., Pillay, D., Corcoran, C., Elgy, J., Lambert, P., Worthington, T., De, P. & Burrows, K. (2007). Spatial aspects of MRSA epidemiology: a case study using stochastic simulation, kernel estimation and SaTScan. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 21 (7): 811-835.
Longden, D., Brammer, J., Bastin, L. & Cooper, N. (2007) Distributed or centralised energy-from-waste policy? Implications of technology and scale at municipal level. Energy Policy , 35 (4): 2622-2634.
Arrell, K., Fisher, P.F., Tate, N.J., & Bastin, L. (2007) A fuzzy k-means classification of elevation derivatives to extract the morphometric classification of landforms for Snowdonia, Wales, Computers and Geosciences, 33 (10): 1366-1381.
Bastin, L., Wood, J.W. & Fisher, P.F. (2002) Visualising uncertainty in multi-spectral remotely sensed imagery. Computers and Geosciences, 28: 337-350.
Fisher, P., Arnot, C., Bastin, L. & Dykes, J. (2001) Exploratory visualization software for reporting environmental survey results. Journal of Environmental Management, 62 (4): 399-413.
Blenkinsop, S., Bastin, L., Fisher, P.F. & Wood, J.W. (2000) Evaluating the perception of uncertainty in alternative visualisation strategies. Cartographica. 37 (1) : 1-13.
Bastin, L. & Thomas, C.D. (1999) The distribution of plant species in urban vegetation fragments. Landscape Ecology, 14: 493-507.
Bastin, L. (1997) Comparison of fuzzy c-means classification, linear mixture modelling and MLC probabilities as tools for unmixing coarse pixels. International Journal of Remote Sensing, 18: 3629-3648.
Bastin, L & Thomas, C.D. (1995) Plant metapopulations and the conservation of urban habitat fragments. Land Contamination and Reclamation, 3: 70-72.
Patents
US Patent no. 7,149,761 : ‘System and method for managing the synchronization of replicated version-managed databases’. Cooke, I., Thompson, G., & Bastin, L. (granted December 2006).
US Patent no. 6,920,469 : ‘Unique ID management in disconnected database replication’. Cooke, I., Thompson, G., & Bastin, L. (granted August 2005).
Refereed book chapters
Bastin, L ., Fisher, P.F., Bacon, M.C., Arnot, C.N.W., & Hughes, M.J. (2007) Reliability of vegetation community information derived using DECORANA ordination and fuzzy c-means clustering. In: Geographic Uncertainty in Environmental Security. (eds. A. Morris & S. Kokhan). Springer.
Bastin, L & Thomas, C.D. (2001) Spatial pattern and dynamics of an annual woodland herb. Chapter 9 in: GIS and Remote Sensing Applications in Biogeography and Ecology (eds. A. C. Millington, S. J. Walsh & P. E. Osborne). Kluwer Academic, Netherlands.
Recent proceedings publications
Williams, M., Cornford, D., Bastin, L., Ingram, B. (2008). Describing and Communicating Uncertainty within the Semantic Web. International Semantic Web Conference, October 26-30, 2008, Karlsruhe, Germany.
Williams, M., Cornford, D., Bastin, L. (2008) Exchanging uncertainty with UncertML – Interoperable geostatistics? GeoEnv, 8-11 September 2008, Southampton, UK.
Woodward, D. & Bastin, L. (2008) The Impact of Ecotourism on Vegetation Cover in Almaty Nature Reserve. The Fourth International Conference on Monitoring and Management of Visitor Flows in Recreational and Protected Areas. 14/19 October 2008, Tuscany, Italy.
Williams, M., Cornford, D., Bastin, L., Ingram, B. (2008). Web Processing Service based interoperable, automated interpolation, European Geophysical Union, 14-18 April 2008, Vienna, Austria.
Raver, J.L. , Dawson, J., Grojean, M., Bastin, L. & Smith, D.B. (2008). Contextual predictors of organizational level aggression from staff and patients. Industrial and Organizational Psychology annual conference, March 2008, San Francisco, CA.
Williams, M, Cornford, D, Bastin, L & Ingram, B (2008) UncertML: an XML schema for exchanging uncertainty., GISRUK, April 2008, Manchester, UK.
Leibovici, D., Bastin, L., Jackson, M. (2008) Discovering spatially multiway collocations, GISRUK, April 2008, Manchester, UK.
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