Zijun Yang

Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina Wilmington

zy_headshot_hi.jpg

yangz [at] uncw [dot] edu



1337 Center for Marine Science


5600 Marvin K. Moss Lane

Wilmington, NC 28409



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 Earth observation, agriculture, vegetation monitoring, and environmental sustainability. My 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 spatial and temporal dynamics of 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.

news

Mar 10, 2026 My presentations and sessions at AAG 2026 in San Francisco!
Mar 01, 2026 Our book chapter “Monitoring crop phenology with remote sensing” is online! This chapter is part of “Agricultural Applications of Earth Observation” published by Elsevier.
Dec 10, 2025 My presentations at AGU 2025 in New Orleans!
Sep 12, 2025 We developed a scalable index for mapping harvesting datas of corn and soybean over the US Midwest! See “A novel Normalized Harvest Phenology Index (NHPI) for corn and soybean harvesting date detection using Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery on Google Earth Engine” on Remote Sensing of Environment.
Dec 02, 2024 Check out our new publication on spatiotemporal image fusion: “Multistream STGAN: A Spatiotemporal Image Fusion Model With Improved Temporal Transferability” on IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing.
Jul 25, 2024 My new paper “EMET: An emergence-based thermal phenological framework for near real-time crop type mapping” is now online at ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing!