Research

My expertise is to combine remote sensing (satellites, CubeSats, Unmanned Aerial System (UAS), LiDAR, etc.), spatial analytics, big data analytics, High-performance computing (HPC), and cloud computing to examine agroecosystem at multi scales (macro/local/micro) using a multisource data science and multi-level modeling (or, hierarchical modeling) approach. These environmental health issues - droughts, floods, surface runoff, and non-point source pollution to water body that are linked with soil moisture contents and precipitation.

The status of the soil is vital to agricultural studies. Current crop yield modeling does not take soil moisture conditions into account, however, soil moisture is very important for the crop growth. Literature shows that having continuous soil moisture measurements will lead to improving crop yield forecasting, and irrigation planning. Moreover, from the environmentalist’s perspective, when the soil is saturated, seepage and infiltration are barely possible, triggering the surface runoff, which brings sediments and nutrients to the water bodies, and therefore cause a series of ecological problems. Knowing the soil status, especially the soil moisture status, is critical to reducing such environmental and ecological issues.

With the increasing impacts of anthropogenic activities, now our ecosystems require related indicators have to reflect these anthropogenic impacts to represent the complex cause and effect relations in human–environmental systems. In order to give information for a sustainable use and management of natural resources, our research have to look into the the abundance of selected species, the concentration of selected elements, and ecosystem composition and structure. We need not only look into the land, but also into the ocean.

At 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. My previous research at ASU also focused on timeseries remote sensing research and applications using combinations of satellite imaging, artificial intelligence, and statistical approaches as applied to global coral reef ecosystems as part of the Allen Coral Atlas.

Useful Sites

• Allen Coral Atlas

• NOAA Coral Reef Watch

Corel Reef Ecosystem