Dr. Yilun Zhao

POSTDOCTORAL NETWORK  |   Global Change Center

Postdoctoral Associate

Faculty Mentor:  Dr. Yanghui Kang

Biological Systems Engineering

yilunz@vt.edu

Google Scholar 

Dr. Yilun Zhao is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech, working in Dr. Yanghui Kang’s Ecosystem Intelligence Lab. Her research focuses on advancing biodiversity and ecosystem function monitoring through remote sensing and geospatial artificial intelligence. She integrates multi-source satellite imagery, ecological principles, and data-driven methods to investigate how ecosystems respond to both natural processes and management-driven interventions, with an emphasis on scalable and transferable monitoring approaches. Her work has developed methods to characterize vegetation phenology at individual and species levels, detect subtle and gradual ecosystem disturbances, and track large-scale changes in plant biodiversity using dense time series remote sensing data. More recently, her research has expanded to quantifying ecosystem carbon sequestration in support of nature-based climate solutions, aiming to enable robust, transparent, and scalable carbon accounting. This effort involves building standardized benchmark datasets that combine ecosystem carbon flux measurements with satellite observations and climate and environmental variables, as well as systematically evaluating machine learning approaches in terms of predictive accuracy, generalizability, robustness, and uncertainty. Overall, her research explores how emerging remote sensing and AI techniques can enhance our ability to monitor, protect, and restore natural ecosystems in a rapidly changing world.