The discipline of land change science has been evolving rapidly in the past decades. Remote sensing has played a major role in one of the most critical components of land change science, which includes observation, monitoring, and characterization of land change. In this forum presentation, Dr. Zhu will first introduce a new remote sensing perspective on land change — the multifaceted view — and the corresponding five facets including change location, time, target, process, and agent. Finally, Dr. Zhu will introduce the very first contiguous U.S. (CONUS-wide) land agent product that provides annual (and day-of-year) and high-resolution land change information based on the Object-based Disturbance Agent Classification Algorithm (ODACA) and the COntinuous monitoring of Land Disturbance (COLD) algorithm.

Bio

Dr. Zhu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, the Founding Director of the Global Environmental Remote Sensing (GERS) Laboratory and the CATALYST-UConn Center of Excellence at the University of Connecticut (UConn), Storrs, CT. He is a UConn Featured Faculty, the recipient of a 2021 UConn-AAUP Excellence Award, a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher (2020-2021), a member of the USGS-NASA Landsat Science Team (2018-2023), and an author of the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCAS) on Land Cover and Land-Use Change for the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Dr. Zhu is the Associate Editor of Remote Sensing of Environment, Science of Remote Sensing, Journal of Remote Sensing, and serves on the Editorial Board of PeerJ and Remote Sensing. Dr. Zhu’s research focuses on developing novel numerical, statistical, and computational approaches that integrate satellite data and in-situ measurements for studying coupled human-environment systems and environmental change at multiple spatiotemporal scales, with particular emphasis on large-scale and dense time series analyses. Dr. Zhu is currently the PI or Institutional PI for active research grants totaling $2.7 million, and he is participating in active grants totaling ~$21 million. Dr. Zhu’s projects are mainly supported by government funding agencies, such as USGS, NASA, NSF, USDA, IARPA, DEEP, as well as by the private sector, such as The Climate Corporation, Eversource Energy, and the PCI Geomatics Corporation.