Yaping Xu's Academic Homepage

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With Plant Sciences, University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture (UTIA), I am leading the UAV studies on biofuel crop phenotyping collaborated with the Center for Bioenergy Innovation, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and funded by DOE.

I also lead a study funded by DARPA that uses an airborne and terrestrial hyperspectral camera (imaging spectroscopy) to study how plants respond to environmental stressors. 

Starting from August 2023, I will be joining Sam Houston State University as an assistant professor of remote sensing with Environmental and Geosciences. My research interests include the application of geostatistics, machine learning, and remote sensing in soil moisture mapping and plant/crop phenotyping, coupled human-environment system and health, agro-ecosystem modeling, as well as spatio-temporal representation of the geospatial data.

I participated in the Southeast Agriculture project sponsored by NASA and served as the team lead in 2016, and also participated in a project funded by Louisiana Transportation Research Center that measures soil moisture based on infrared and thermal sensors on UAVs. 

I am also interested in scientific communication.  I competed in the Louisiana Sea Grant Coastal Connection Thesis Presentation, a modified version of the “Three Minute Thesis,” and won the 2nd Place. This experience demonstrated my actions in bridging the gaps between science and communities.

In addition, I was a co-founder and president of the GIScience Club, an official student association at Louisiana State University. 

I invite you to check my academic portals (my Google Scholar, GitHub, and Twitter), which you can find in the contact section below. You are also welcome to check my YouTube channel on UAV Tutorial for real-world applications.