email: austin@sig-gis.com
web: http://www.uvm.edu/~atroy

Background and Experience

In addition to being a principal of SIG, Dr. Troy is an Associate Professor at the University of Vermont, with a primary appointment in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and a secondary appointment in Computer Science. He has been at Vermont since 2001, where he has taught courses including introductory GIS, GIS for graduate students, advanced spatial methods, GIS for urban ecology and land use planning and economics. His recent sponsored research includes economically-based urban growth and transportation simulation in the state of Vermont using UrbanSim and TransCAD, land cover mapping and Phosphorus export analysis for the Lake Champlain Basin, spatially explicit valuation of ecosystem services for the state of New Jersey, analysis of the effects of environmental amenities and disamenities on housing values in Baltimore and New Jersey, analysis of the relationship between residential land use patterns and Nitrogen flux in portions of the Chesapeake watershed, development of a new system of parcel-level object oriented classification of remote sensing imagery for urban vegetation inventory and management,  statistical modeling of the predictors of urban vegetation cover, development of urban forest management GIS tools, analysis of the effects of suburban development on wildlife habitat and watershed health in Vermont, and development of new methodologies for mapping urban sprawl. Throughout his research he is interested in applying novel spatial and econometric methods. He has received funding from a number of agencies including the US Department of Transportation, the USDA Forest Service, the National Science Foundation (as a subawardee), the Northeastern States Research Cooperative, and the US Environmental Protection Agency.  Dr. Troy is Co-director of the UVM Spatial Analysis Lab. He is also a fellow of the Gund Institute of Ecological Economics and a Co-Principal Investigator on the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, which is a long-term ecological research (LTER) project of the National Science Foundation. 

Dr. Troy has done extensive consulting for SIG on spatially explicit ecosystem service valuation and benefits transfer, GIS mapping, cartography, and watershed management. Previously he consulted on econometric land valuation methodologies for the California Energy Commission, worked as a programmer/analyst for the U.C. Berkeley GIS Center and as a research forester in Canada. 

Dr. Troy served as lead editor of and contributor to a recently published book on wildfire and suburban sprawl, entitled Living on the Edge: Economic, Institutional, and Management Perspectives on Wildfire Hazard in the Urban Interface. He has published articles in many peer reviewed journals, including Landscape and Urban Planning, Ecological Economics, Biosciences, International Journal of Remote Sensing, Spatial Economic Analysis, BMC Public Health, Ecosystems, Journal of General Internal Medicine, Society and Natural Resources, Environmental Management, the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Economic Botany, Journal of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA),and Wildlife Society Bulletin. He has contributed chapters to several peer-reviewed books. He served for four years on the Planning Commissioner for the city of Burlington, VT.

He has a bachelor's degree from Yale, a Master's degree from Yale School of Forestry and Environment Studies and a PhD from the department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management at U.C. Berkeley. He is proficient with GIS software (Arc GIS, Arc View, Arc/Info and all extensions), GIS programming (Avenue programming, AML programming, Map Objects/Arc Objects with Visual Basic), remote sensing software (Erdas Imagine, eCognition, Feature Analyst), databases (Microsoft Access, VBA for Access), modeling software (UrbanSim), and statistical software (S-Plus, S-Plus spatial statistics module, SAS). He also has experience with the UrbanSim model.