Dr Lucy Bastin

Profile
I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. I joined the School in 2003 after 3 years as a software developer, where I focussed on maintaining map data integrity and currency for field workers who may only have intermittent communication with a central GIS server. 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. My work on a recent secondment as a Senior Researcher at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission combined  software development and remote sensing experience to generate Web-based landcover validation tools for use by an international community of experts in biodiversity and forestry monitoring.

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

• BSc with First Class Honours in Zoology, University of Nottingham, 1991
• MSc with Distinction in Geographical Information Science, University of Leicester, 1995 (ESRI Prize)
• PhD in Spatial Population Ecology, University of Birmingham, 1996

• Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Aston University, 2009

Employment 

• 2011 - present: Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, Aston University
• 2010 - 2011: Senior Researcher, Global Environmental Monitoring Unit, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.
  
• 2004 – 2010: 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

• CS3210: Geographical Information Systems
• CS3160: Enterprise Application Technology.
• EC304G: Spatial Data Management
• Final year / Masters GIS/ Computer Science / Environmental Science projects
• 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 funding

• 2006-09: Co-investigator on 'Interoperable Interpolation for Automated Mapping (INTAMAP)’ - EU FP6 STREP (2.4m Euro, £216k to Aston)
• 2010-13: Co-investigator on ‘UncertWeb: the Uncertainty Enabled Model Web’ - EU FP7 STREP (2.5m Euro, £560k to Aston)

PhD Supervision
Richard Jones – co-supervised with Dan Cornford.
I am happy to supervise PhD candidates, particularly in the field of spatial analysis for environmental and ecological applications.

Membership of Professional Bodies
Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

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Selected publications

Refereed journal publications.

Langford, W., Gordon, A., Bastin, L., Bekessy, S., White, M., and Newell, G. (2011)  Raising the bar for systematic conservation planning. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Volume 26, Issue 12, December 2011, Pages 634-640 .

Gordon, A., Langford, W., White, M., Todd, J. and Bastin, L (2011)  Modelling trade offs between public and private conservation policies,  Biological Conservation 144 (1):  558-566.

E. King, J. Dawson, M. West, V.  Gilrane, C. Peddie and L. Bastin ‘Why organizational and community demography matter: Representativeness and the emergence of incivility and organizational outcomes’ Academy of Management Journal (in press, 2011)

Leibovici, D, Bastin, L and Jackson, M (2010)  Higher Order Co-occurrences in Point Pattern Analysis and  Decision Tree Clustering for Spatial Data. Computers and Geosciences, 37 (3): 382-389.

Williams, M, Cornford, D, Bastin, L, Jones, R and Parker, S (2010)  Automatic processing, quality assurance and serving of real-time weather data. Computers and Geosciences, 37 (3): 353-362.

Bastin, L and Longden, D (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, 33, (6), 492-503.

Langford, W, Gordon, A and Bastin, L (2009) When do conservation planning methods deliver? Quantifying the consequences of uncertainty. Ecological Informatics, 4 (3): 123-135.

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 (2010). Urban ecosystems – tapping the human resource. In The New Optimists: Scientists View Tomorrow's World & What it Means to Us (editor K. Richards) Linus ISBN-10: 1907843000

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

Jones, R, Bastin, L, Cornford, D and Williams, M (2010) Handling and communicating uncertainty in chained geospatial Web Services. Spatial Accuracy, Leicester, UK July 2010.

Bastin, L (2010). Designing labs to promote justified self-efficacy in Computer Science students. Improving University Teaching, Ottawa, July 2010.

Leibovici, D, Bastin, L, Anand, S, Swan, J, Hobona, G and Jackson, M (2010) Spatially Clustered Associations in Health GIS. GIS Research UK, London, UK, April 2010.  Prizewinning presentation (Best Paper on Spatial Analysis).

Jones, R, Bastin, L, Cornford, D and Williams, M (2010) Managing and Communicating Uncertainty in Geospatial Web Service Workflows. Open Source GIS, Nottingham, UK, June 2010.        

Cornford, D, Bastin, L and Williams, M (2010) Uncertainty enabled Sensor Observation Services. European Geophysical Union, Vienna, Austria. May 2010.

Bastin, L, Cornford, D and Williams, M (2010) Computer says Maybe.... Royal Statistical Society meeting on Spatial Uncertainty , York, UK, April 2010.

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.