Dr. Mohammed A. Kalkhan has over 20 years experience in research and teaching at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. As a member of the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL) there, he has also served as an affiliate faculty in the Department of Forest, Rangeland, and Watershed Stewardship, and as an advisor for the Interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate in Geospatial Science, Graduate Degree Program in Ecology (GDPE), The School of Global Environmental Sustainability (SOGES), and Department of Earth Resources (currently the Department of Geosciences) at Colorado State University (CSU). Dr. Kalkhan received his BSc in Forestry (1973) and MSc in Forest Mensuration (1980) from the College of Agriculture and Forestry, the University of Mosul, Iraq. He received his PhD in forest biometrics- remote sensing applications from the Department of Forest Sciences at Colorado State University, USA, in 1994. From 1975 to 1982, he was a lecturer in the Department of Forestry, College of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Mosul. In 1994, he joined the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory. Dr. Kalkhan’s main interests are in the integration of field data, remote sensing, and GIS with geospatial statistics to understand landscape parameters through the use of a complex model with thematic mapping approaches, including sampling methods and designs, biometrics, determination of uncertainty and mapping accuracy assessment.
[This book] covers many topics that are poorly treated by others. ... Chapter 2 on sampling is a true gem. It covers all the standard approaches, but in addition has an extensive discussion of multiphase or double sampling which Kalkhan has used extensively in his own research. There is also an extensive discussion of a case study in which a pixel nested plot (PNP) sampling design is used. This is useful material for researchers and course instructors alike. ... This reviewer enjoyed Chapter 4 immensely. It provides a stimulating discussion of geospatial analysis and modeling including the topics of variogram fitting and kriging. These are pitched at just the right level for most applied researchers who want to use these approaches as a tool to solve their spatial analysis problems. A particular treat is the explanation of spatial autoregressive approaches, binary classification trees and the GARP genetic algorithm. These are topics invariably neglected in many of the standard texts. -Nigel Waters, Geomatica, Vol. 65, No. 4, 2011