farhan_avicena
Feb 10, 2022
Scholarship / Personal Statement | Fulbright Scholarship | GIS & RS for Forest fire issues [2]
Hello everyone. I plan to apply to the Fulbright scholarship and we were asked to write a personal statement
o information of educations
o practical experiences.
o special interest
o career plants
o Any significant factors that have influenced your educational and personal development.
My life as a youngster was filled with the achievement stories of my parents. They were one of the originators of the household garden and the initiators of the biopore installing movement in our village. They have succeeded in influencing many parties, including their children, to always prioritize the issue of protecting the environment. As an only boy, I felt that I had a responsibility to, even if only slightly, contribute to the green movement. And that was the time when I began to ask myself, "What can I truly do?"
In the dry season of 2015, my television screen again showed people running from their villages when their houses started to burn. This year was recorded as a dark period for Indonesia in dealing with environmental problems after more than 2.6 million hectares of forest and land were scorched by fire. Losses from this environmental disaster resulted in more than 28 million people being affected, 19 people dying, and nearly 500 thousand people experiencing respiratory problems. We watched the news together, but I felt the people and events seemed like a world far away.
In 2019, I flew to South Kalimantan as one of the delegates from thirty-three provinces in Indonesia. We had the opportunity to learn more about peatland and its role in climate change. In Sebangau National Park, the effects of the long El-Nino drought were being felt. For about an hour, shallow red peat water carried our wooden boat into the dark forest of Kalimantan. The facts were explained. Fire is a nightmare for anyone living in this protected area. As one of the largest carbon storage points, peat damage will not only drag Kalimantan but also the international community to extinction. The whole delegation fell silent. The question came back, "Then what can we do?"
After my travel, I was accepted as a practical assistant in geographic information systems and remote sensing subjects. Through this program, I worked to help professors in the applied meteorology department providing teaching on spatial meteorologies, such as gaining image data, processing vector and raster data, until ground-truthing. The lessons were quite fun, especially when I was guiding the final project where each student was allowed to create a fire analysis map using whatever data they wanted. Trying to spark their scientific awareness about forest fires, I'm still not sure, "Is this enough for me?"
Until finally my supervising professor challenged me with realities that the fire in 2019 scorched again the forests, burned the animals in them, and plunged Indonesian nature into a dark future. Several months after the incident, I was assigned to fly to one of the provinces most affected by the fires, Jambi Province.
Equipped with several meteorological tools, expertise in GIS mapping, and a curiosity to know the environmental problems firsthand, I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. Only a few months after that worst fire event, the heavy rains still had not erased the evidence of the destruction of nature. The black withered trees, vacant land, and collapsed houses became the scenery of my journey to the location of my research. This disaster not only had an impact on the ecosystem but also damaged the economic condition of the community so that the after-effects extended to social and political problems. For several weeks, I spent the day researching and improvising, convinced that this was all I could offer to all of my previous questions.
The study ended with satisfactory results. Especially after over a thousand hotspots were recorded in the previous year of 2019, this research site has yet to experience any bushfire incidents to date. A paper resulting from this research also was chosen among the Top 10 Best Papers and published in Youth Peatland Conference 2020. However, I still strongly believe that scientific mapping still has more potential. I left Jambi convinced that the development of an environmental monitoring and management system could profoundly answer this complex problem. The advanced mapping system became my next goal.
With this goal in mind, I hope to pursue a Master of Environmental Science and GIS with an emphasis on forest disaster prevention. This degree would provide an immense impact on my potential to contribute; as both researcher and for the Indonesian environment. I will use my experiences and education to hope to shape such environmental disasters in the Indonesian forest as well as the international ecosystem.
Hello everyone. I plan to apply to the Fulbright scholarship and we were asked to write a personal statement
o information of educations
o practical experiences.
o special interest
o career plants
o Any significant factors that have influenced your educational and personal development.
personal statement
My life as a youngster was filled with the achievement stories of my parents. They were one of the originators of the household garden and the initiators of the biopore installing movement in our village. They have succeeded in influencing many parties, including their children, to always prioritize the issue of protecting the environment. As an only boy, I felt that I had a responsibility to, even if only slightly, contribute to the green movement. And that was the time when I began to ask myself, "What can I truly do?"
In the dry season of 2015, my television screen again showed people running from their villages when their houses started to burn. This year was recorded as a dark period for Indonesia in dealing with environmental problems after more than 2.6 million hectares of forest and land were scorched by fire. Losses from this environmental disaster resulted in more than 28 million people being affected, 19 people dying, and nearly 500 thousand people experiencing respiratory problems. We watched the news together, but I felt the people and events seemed like a world far away.
In 2019, I flew to South Kalimantan as one of the delegates from thirty-three provinces in Indonesia. We had the opportunity to learn more about peatland and its role in climate change. In Sebangau National Park, the effects of the long El-Nino drought were being felt. For about an hour, shallow red peat water carried our wooden boat into the dark forest of Kalimantan. The facts were explained. Fire is a nightmare for anyone living in this protected area. As one of the largest carbon storage points, peat damage will not only drag Kalimantan but also the international community to extinction. The whole delegation fell silent. The question came back, "Then what can we do?"
After my travel, I was accepted as a practical assistant in geographic information systems and remote sensing subjects. Through this program, I worked to help professors in the applied meteorology department providing teaching on spatial meteorologies, such as gaining image data, processing vector and raster data, until ground-truthing. The lessons were quite fun, especially when I was guiding the final project where each student was allowed to create a fire analysis map using whatever data they wanted. Trying to spark their scientific awareness about forest fires, I'm still not sure, "Is this enough for me?"
Until finally my supervising professor challenged me with realities that the fire in 2019 scorched again the forests, burned the animals in them, and plunged Indonesian nature into a dark future. Several months after the incident, I was assigned to fly to one of the provinces most affected by the fires, Jambi Province.
Equipped with several meteorological tools, expertise in GIS mapping, and a curiosity to know the environmental problems firsthand, I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. Only a few months after that worst fire event, the heavy rains still had not erased the evidence of the destruction of nature. The black withered trees, vacant land, and collapsed houses became the scenery of my journey to the location of my research. This disaster not only had an impact on the ecosystem but also damaged the economic condition of the community so that the after-effects extended to social and political problems. For several weeks, I spent the day researching and improvising, convinced that this was all I could offer to all of my previous questions.
The study ended with satisfactory results. Especially after over a thousand hotspots were recorded in the previous year of 2019, this research site has yet to experience any bushfire incidents to date. A paper resulting from this research also was chosen among the Top 10 Best Papers and published in Youth Peatland Conference 2020. However, I still strongly believe that scientific mapping still has more potential. I left Jambi convinced that the development of an environmental monitoring and management system could profoundly answer this complex problem. The advanced mapping system became my next goal.
With this goal in mind, I hope to pursue a Master of Environmental Science and GIS with an emphasis on forest disaster prevention. This degree would provide an immense impact on my potential to contribute; as both researcher and for the Indonesian environment. I will use my experiences and education to hope to shape such environmental disasters in the Indonesian forest as well as the international ecosystem.