Alan Brown is the Remote Sensing Manager at the Countryside Council for Wales, based in Bangor. 

He studied botany and zoology at King's College London and has worked since then in nature conservation, first for the Nature Conservancy Council, based in Scotland, and since the early 1990s for CCW in Wales. He led one of the teams carrying out a botanical survey of the Scottish uplands in the late 1980s, becoming familiar with practical air photo interpretation. He went on to specialise in habitat surveillance and monitoring using field sampling methods, leading an EC – sponsored ‘Life’ project on this between 1996 and 2000. 

Around 7 years ago Alan took responsibility for developing practical remote sensing methods in CCW, working in partnership with UK Space Agency (BNSC), Aberystwyth University and Environment Systems Ltd to produce a landscape-scale habitat map of Wales based on satellite imagery using object-based methods. His current work with the same partners includes in-situ hyperspectral imaging to look at habitat condition – anticipating data-collection from unmanned systems – the investigation of methods for automatic change detection and tracking errors through the image processing chain to allow better measurement of biophysical variables. He is active in promoting the use of remote sensing for biodiversity monitoring in the UK and chairs a special interest group of the European nature conservation agencies on monitoring and remote sensing.