BANGOR – Clark University junior Matthew Holden of Bangor is a finalist in the 2003-2004 Honors Competition for Student Posters on remote sensing and global information systems topics to be presented at the Centennial Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, March 14-19 in Philadelphia.

Holden’s research focuses on creating a database of historical land use and developing new methods of assessing landscape change. He is currently in the process of building a land-use database of 1,951 maps.

As a finalist, Holden will submit a poster expanding the material presented in the abstract, “Creating Historical Land Use Maps for Long-term Change Analysis in Massachusetts.” His poster abstract was chosen as a finalist. He will present it at the geographer’s meeting. He also will receive $400 toward traveling expenses.

“It is phenomenally rare that undergraduates even get selected [in this competition],” said R. Gil Pontius, assistant professor of international development, community and environment at Clark University. “Nearly all the others in these competitions are doctoral students presenting their dissertations.”

Holden majors in geography with a focus on geographic information systems. He was the Woods Hole Marine Biology Laboratory student last summer and was named a 2002-2003 HERO Fellow. HERO stands for Human Environment Regional Observatory, a long-term research program focusing on land use, water issues and climate change. It is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Holden’s overall goal is to establish a long-term data archive. He also is working on a project to develop a new method for accounting for errors when maps of different dates are compared and on a project concerning comparison of single and multi-date approaches to quantifying wildfire burn severity.

Holden is in the Army ROTC program at Clark. He is the son of Maureen Walsh of Bangor and is a 2001 graduate of Bangor High School.