Dr. Zhi-Liang Zhu Senior Scientist, Adjunct Professor 605-594-6131 zhu@usgs.gov

Research Interests: Forestry with remote sensing and natural vegetation assessment

Dr. Zhiliang Zhu is a physical scientist at EROS. Dr. Zhu's research interests are in mapping and characterization of vegetation communities in terms of species composition and structure, large-area land and vegetation mapping, and applications of remotely sensed data to environmental assessment. His work includes national, regional and global scale land cover mapping and he produced the first percent forest cover map of the United States derived from remotely sensed data sets. In addition to large area mapping, his other research activities focus on developing methodologies for mapping ecological systems with a particular emphasis on fire ecology. Research themes in this area include deriving improved approaches to mapping vegetation canopy height and cover characteristics, wildland fuel data, burn severity, ecosystem responses to fire, baseline vegetation and fuel data with captured disturbance information and invasive species. Dr. Zhu is the Co-PI of the LANDFIRE project, a national vegetation, wildland fuel, and ecosystem condition assessment project, and the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity project, a national fire monitoring project. Dr. Zhu received his B.S. in forestry from Nanjing Forestry University, China, and M.S. and Ph.D. in natural resource management and remote sensing from the University of Michigan.

National-scale map of forest cover types of the United States... more

Fire atlas of Mesa Verde National Park.... more