← Corey Scher · About

Active

• Weekly building damage surveys in Gaza

  Cited by humanitarian organizations and hundreds of media reports, providing public understanding of the rapid pace and extent of impacts of the Israeli bombardment and invasion on the Gaza Strip.

• Mapping building damage in Lebanon and northern Israel

  Active monitoring of building damage through the regional escalation of the Israel–Hezbollah conflict.

• Mapping damage to human settlements in Ukraine

  Coherent change detection for nationwide monitoring of damage to human settlements during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

• Mapping building damage during the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires

  Rapid-response mapping while the wildfires were active and smoke occluded satellite optical imagery.

Selected projects

• Detecting new burial sites in Tigray

  Analysis of very high-resolution optical imagery with the visual investigations team at the Washington Post.

• 'Sacrificing part for the whole'

  Mapping floodwater extent in China to support investigative journalism at the Washington Post.

• Fires on land concessions for palm cultivation in Indonesia

  Remote sensing of burn patterns in support of an investigation into the intentionality of peatland fires for forest clearing.

• Herbicide drift from Israel to Gaza

  Remote sensing of decreases in NDVI coincident with Israeli military spraying of herbicide along the Gaza siege perimeter.

• Wildfire scars from incendiary kites launched from Gaza, 2018

  Tested whether reported wildfire scars from incendiary kites in the Gaza Strip could be detected in open-access satellite radar and optical data.

• Subsidence monitoring in transboundary aquifers

  A satellite-based indicator of shared groundwater sustainability.

• Glacier melt signals with satellite radar and scalable cloud computing

  Master's research, in support of a NASA Cryosphere grant, on glacier melt timing and duration across the Hindu Kush Himalaya.

• Researching some of the youngest land on Earth

  Field experiment at the Wax Lake Delta on how plants help to build land naturally along the Louisiana coast.

• River channel geometry from bathymetric LiDAR

  Undergraduate research at the Environmental Systems Dynamics Lab, UC Berkeley, on fundamental relationships in how rivers change shape across their course.

Convening & teaching

• Tracking the footprint of war

  AGU 2024 Fall Meeting session on the science and practice of conflict impact assessment.

• Physical and Environmental Impacts of War

  Co-convened AGU 2023 Fall Meeting session on scientific perspectives on the physical and environmental impacts of war.

• NASA ARSET in Humanitarian Applications

  Co-taught a session for Earth observation practitioners on the use of NASA open-source processing tools for monitoring damage to built-up areas during military conflict.