Ustin, Susan
Susan at the University of Alcala, Spain, December 2009
Dr. Susan L. Ustin is a landscape and ecosystem ecologist with 30 year expertise in remote sensing data analysis. She has been a Professor in the Department of Land, Air, and Water Resources at the University of California Davis for more than 23 years. She received a Ph.D. in Botany from the University of California Davis in 1983, with a specialization in plant physiological ecology. Her dissertation was on physiological responses to salinity and drought stress in wetland plant species. During a Post-doctoral fellowship, she began working with imaging spectroscopy data with the first Airborne Imaging Spectrometer built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She has and has continued to work with imaging spectroscopy and other remote sensing systems over her career, working at a variety of scales from leaf level to global. Among other studies, she has included mapping vegetation distribution and abundance, including invasive species mapping and mapping biological soil crust in semiarid regions. She has developed methods to quantify canopy water content and wildfire risk. She is currently a member of NASA's MODIS Science Team and the Science Team for the planned HYSPIRI satellite and other previous NASA science teams. She has worked with numerous satellite and airborne optical systems, thermal imagers, and small footprint LiDAR and RaDAR.
Contact:
Susan L. Ustin
Professor of Environmental and Resource Sciences
Email: slustin@ucdavis.edu
Office: 139 Veihmeyer Hall
Phone: 530-752-0621
Fax: 530-752-5262
