Shrestha is a Senior Scientific Programmer/Analyst for Science Systems and Applications, Inc. working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He is a science team member of NASA Black Marble nighttime light product suites that enable, through tracking variations in energy use over time, research on urbanization and human development, light pollution, illegal fishing, fires, and disaster impacts and recovery.
Richard Sliuzas Richard Sliuzas received his PhD in Geographical Sciences from the Utrecht University. He is a Professor of Urban Planning for Disaster Risk Reduction at the ITC, University of Twente, Netherlands. His major research areas include urban risk reduction strategies and urban informality. He used a variety of methods to support his research, including aerial and satellite‐based data acquisition systems, spatiotemporal analysis and spatial modeling, community participation, and mapping. He has extensively worked in sub‐Saharan Africa, Asia, South‐East Asia, and Latin America.
Ben Somers Ben Somers is an Associate Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit (KU) Leuven Division of Forest, Nature & Landscape. With his team, he focuses on studying the role, vitality, and stability of plant species and their communities in (sub)urban and semi‐natural environments. Recent developments in remote sensing technology are exploited to quantify vegetation structure and functioning at various temporal and spatial scales. He and his team have a proven track record in the development of image processing algorithms and the application of optical remote sensing including imaging spectroscopy, LiDAR processing, and satellite image time series analysis.
Eleanor C. Stokes Eleanor C. Stokes is a Remote Sensing and Urban Land Scientist who is interested in the planetary impacts of urbanization. During her doctorate, she was awarded the NASA Jenkins fellowship and began using the earliest data from the Suomi‐NPP VIIRS day/night visible band to understand how the changing structure of urban areas shapes sustainability. She now leads Black Marble research activities at the Earth from Space Institute at USRA and was recently profiled in ESRI’s Women and GIS: Stars of Spatial Science. She received a PhD from Yale’s School of the Environment and an MS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT.
Qingsong Sun Qingsong Sun received his PhD from Boston University, USA. He worked on the Black Marble project when he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is working in the Land Data Operational Products Evaluation group at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. His research interest centers on MODIS/VIIRS land product quality assessment. The objective of land products quality assessment is to evaluate and document the scientific quality of the land products with respect to their intended performance.
Hannes Taubenböck Hannes Taubenböck received his diploma in Geography from the Ludwig‐Maximilians‐Universität München (Germany) in 2004, and the PhD from the Julius Maximilians‐Universität Würzburg (Germany) in 2008. In 2005, he joined the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD), German Aerospace Center (DLR). After a Postdoctoral Research Phase with the University of Würzburg (2007–2010), he returned to DLR–DFD in 2010. In 2013, he became the Head of the “City and Society” team. In 2019, he habilitated at the University of Würzburg in Geography. His current research focuses on remote sensing and big data analyses for urban geography.
Jinyan Tian Jinyan Tian is a Lecturer of Beijing Laboratory of Water Resources Security, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China. His research interests include remote sensing of vegetation mapping and forest parameters inversion. He was an investigator for over projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundations of China. He authored or coauthored over 5 patents and 15 papers.
Jamon Van Den Hoek Jamon Van Den Hoek is an Associate Professor of Geography at Oregon State University where he leads the Conflict Ecology lab. His research seeks new insights on the agency, decision‐making processes, and survival of refugees, internally displaced peoples, and others affected by violent conflict. He maps settlements, forests, and farms using satellite data to connect patterns of long‐term landscape change to processes of conflict, displacement, resilience, and peace. He was a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison where he was a National Science Foundation IGERT Fellow.
Sebastian van der Linden Sebastian van der Linden is a Professor for earth observation and geoinformation science at the Institute for Geography and Geology of the University of Greifswald, Germany. He holds an MSc in Environmental Sciences and PhD in Geography. His main research interest lies in the application of machine learning with optical remote sensing data for a better understanding of land surface processes, especially in the field of imaging spectroscopy and multispectral time series analysis. He is PI for the EnMAP‐Box development, a toolbox for Earth observation data analysis in QGIS.
Keli Wang Keli Wang is a doctoral student of Geographic Information Science at Peking University, Beijing, China. Her research interest centers on spatial epidemiology and spatial interaction. Her research has been published in peer‐reviewed journals.
Le Wang Le Wang is a Professor of Geography at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He got his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests focus on remote sensing of coastal mangrove forests, invasive species, and urban environments. He was the chair of the AAG Remote Sensing Specialty Group (2015–2017), and currently an associate editor of the International Journal of Remote Sensing, a guest editor for the journal “Remote Sensing of Environment,” an editorial board member of the journal “Annals of the American Association of Geographers.” As of today, he has published more than 90 referred journal articles, which have been cited 4800 times on Google Scholar. His work has been funded by NSF, USDA, and USGS.
Zhuosen Wang Zhuosen Wang is an Assistant Research Scientist at the University of Maryland College Park and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He is a science team member of the NASA MODIS and VIIRS Land Discipline team. He coleads the CEOS Land Product Validation Subgroup Surface Radiation/Albedo Product Validation focus area and serves as Chair of IEEE Geoscience & Remote Sensing Society (Washington D.C./ Northern Virginia Chapter). His research interests include monitoring energy services and human activities using Suomi‐NPP VIIRS day/night band and modeling and evaluation of land surface anisotropic characteristics and albedo.
Eric Weber Eric Weber is a Research Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), USA. His research focuses on the application of remote sensing and associated built‐environment data for spatiotemporal mapping and characterization of human populations, including the development of bottom‐up models that minimize reliance on national census data for mapping populations. He currently leads the development of LandScan USA, a high‐resolution gridded model of day and night populations in the USA.
Tzai‐Hung Wen Tzai‐Hung Wen is a Professor of Geography at National Taiwan University, Taiwan. His academic career focuses on developing geospatial computational methods to improve the understanding of public health and the urban environment. His major original articles are published in Scientific Reports, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, International Journal of Health Geographics, and Applied Geography. He currently serves as the Chairman of Chinese Cartographic Association, the Editor‐in‐Chief of Journal of Population Studies, and Associate Editor of BMC Public Health.
Man S. Wong Man S. Wong is an Associate Professor of Remote Sensing and GIS in the Department of Land Surveying and Geo‐Informatics at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research focuses on the use of remote sensing to study urban heat island effect, urban environmental quality, landslides, vegetation and ecosystems, spectral mixture analysis, aerosol retrieval, air quality, and dust storm monitoring. He authored or coauthored more than 100 peer‐reviewed journal articles since 2005.
Zhifeng Wu Zhifeng Wu is a Professor and Dean of the School of Geography and Remote Sensing at the Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, China. His research interests include urban remote sensing, terrestrial remote sensing, environmental GIS, and spatiotemporal data analysis, and monitoring of natural resources. He authored or coauthored over 140 articles. He