About Me

My name is Joanmarie Del Vecchio (pronouns: she/her), and I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College. I am a geoscientist who investigates how climate change has shaped the landscape, both past and present.

I will be starting as an Assistant Professor at the College of William & Mary in January 2024! Click on "Research projects" to find opportunities for student research and collaboration.

Leveraging big data for geomorphology

Supported by the Neukom Institute for Computation, I use multispectral and topographic data to quantify landscape form and change.
To perform this task at the scale required to derive mechanistic explanations for spatial trends in landscape form, I use high-resolution datasets at large spatial scales.
I write algorithms to analyze these vast datasets, and perform these calculations on either cloud or cluster computers.
The video on the right is my keynote address at Colgate Technology Immersion Week 2022, explaining these big data techniques.

Teaching Python-based Landscape Analysis

To work with large geospatial datasets, I use Python libraries to acquire and clean imagery and rasters, and to tranform their contents to tabular data for further exploration.
Exploratory data analysis (EDA) in Python (or other languages) is an essential skill for the modern geoscientist. I teach my students to use code to collect and analyze data.

Student projects

In my Surface Processes course, we worked with Python notebooks to explore code-based manipulation of time series, geochemical and satellite data in activities I called data tutorials.
For final projects, students chose topics to create their own data tutorials and self-graded the assignment

One student wrote an algorithm to quantify the impact of glaciation on valley shape.

One student used USGS and land cover data to show how urbanization impacts hydrographs

One student used a published literature review to consider temperature effects on chemical weathering.

Project Portfolio