Gabriela Mihaela Afrasinei is geographer and a remote sensing and GIS early-career researcher, with more than 7 years of experience in interdisciplinary research and field survey. She received her PhD from the University of Cagliari, Italy, in 2016 and her MSc from the University of Iasi, Romania, in 2012. Her current work focuses on remote sensing techniques applied to land degradation assessment. She authored and co-authored 3 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and 8 conference papers. She is a SPIE and IEEE member and reviewer for the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing.

In particular, her research background is based on GIS tools and remote sensing techniques applied to environmental sciences research, with special emphasis on spatial analysis, digital image processing, classification and change detection analysis. Academic preparation and research background in Romania, Italy, Tunisia and Australia. Keywords: natural and anthropogenic risk assessment, desertification and land-degradation, land cover and land use mapping, change detection.

Strong organisational skills, teamwork abilities gained during academic preparation experiences and extracurricular activities. She conducted research within the WADIS-MAR Demonstration Project, funded by the European Commission through the SWIM Programme (www.wadismar.eu), working as part of a multidisciplinary team. Highly ambitious, methodical, attentive to detail and capable of working on own initiative.
The current PhD research focused on the assessment of the dynamics of desertification and land degradation phenomena and proposed an adaptive methodology incorporating remote sensing techniques, ancillary, field (+ spectroradiometric) and XRD data for the identification and estimation of quantitative and qualitative change of degradation – indicating features. This study is also part of the WADIS-MAR Demonstration Project, funded by the European Commission through the SWIM Programme (www.wadismar.eu).