Zijun Yang

Hello! I am an assistant professor at the Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of North Carolina Wilmington.

My research interest lies in the intersection of remote sensing, machine learning, agriculture, and environmental sustainability. I aim to better understand ecosystem dynamics under the changing climate through an integration of multi-scale remote sensing (e.g., satellite, drone, and near-surface platforms), field data collection, and GeoAI modeling.

My ongoing work spans from near real-time crop characterization (e.g., crop type, crop progress, and health condition), remote identification of vegetation phenology, spatiotemporal fusion of multi-scale remote sensing images, to modeling climate change impacts on agricultural, forest, and coastal ecosystems.

Before UNCW, I received my PhD in Geography from the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I worked with Dr. Chunyuan Diao at the Remote Sensing Space-Time Innovation Lab. I obtained my Master of Science in Natural Resources and Environment from the University of Michigan, and my Bachelor of Science in Geographic Information Science from Sun Yat-sen University.