Student Bio
Egahi Gideon Emmaogboji, an MSc student of Geography and Data Science at Carleton University, completed his undergraduate studies in Surveying and Geoinformatics at the Federal University of Technology Minna, Niger State, Nigeria. Egahi is passionate about Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) and their diverse uses in geomatics and remote sensing. During his undergraduate programme, he had his first experience with RPAS technology when a commercially available eBee X fixed-wing drone system was used for surveying applications in some of his classes.
After his undergraduate programme, he went on to gain hands-on experience while working at the flour mills of Nigeria’s Sunti Golden Sugar Farms in Mokwa, a 15,000-hectare farmland. He was tasked with carrying out high-precision surveys for land preparations, real-time monitoring of crop conditions, and the determination of the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). He was also part of a team tasked with fixing ground control stations, designing area-based flight paths, testing and operating RPAS platforms, and carrying out other engineering surveys. He used the DJI Phantom 4 drone, the eBee X drone, and Pix4D software to turn images into highly precise, georeferenced multispectral 2D NDVI maps and 3D models and create orthophotos and NDVI maps. His team also carried out post-processing of GNSS raw data and photos and played an important role in farm management and optimisation using their decision support system.
Subsequently, he did some research at the Federal University of Technology Akure, where he carried out research on GIS applications such as spatial modelling, real-time and big data analysis, and web GIS. Before starting his programme at Carleton, he worked as a geomatics engineer at the Federal University of Health Sciences, Otukpo, where he was involved in conducting ground surveys, geophysical surveys, geodatabase management, geotechnical investigations, and monitoring.
In the UTILI programme, Egahi’s research is focused on Multi-Scale Snow Depth Mapping Accuracy Assessment in Different Terrain Unit Types in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories Canada. He is under the supervision of Prof. Murray Richardson. Egahi’s work focuses on UAV-based photogrammetry and piloted aircraft photogrammetry and their application in accuracy assessment. The assessments will be done using precise snow depth measurements, and it will involve comparing the accuracies from the UAV and piloted aircraft in different terrain types and testing how well derived precision map results indicate ground-based accuracies. Egahi is pleased to be part of the CREATE UTILI student cohort. He believes it’s a rare opportunity to broaden his knowledge and skill set, learn from industry experts associated with UTILI, enhance his work, and aid his goal as a researcher to offer solutions to environmental challenges in Canada and beyond.