Dr. Sassan Saatchi’s present research interests include the global carbon cycle, in particular the forest biomass/carbon dynamics, land use and land cover change, forest structure and regeneration, and the impact of climate change and variability such as droughts on global forest function and resilience. He is currently directing several interdisciplinary research projects studying the carbon cycling of tropical forests, particularly in the Amazon and Congo Basin using satellite remote sensing data. As an adjunct professor at UCLA, he has also been collaborating with biologists to integrate satellite observations for mapping species functional diversity and habitat characteristics, and with social scientists to model and understand how human activities have impacted vegetation ecosystems. Dr. Saatchi has been developing new active remote sensing techniques from airborne and spaceborne platforms to quantify vegetation structure and water status and creating a data assimilation and modeling framework to improve understanding of processes that impact forest carbon and water cycling. He is actively involved in planned NASA’s NISAR and ESA’s BIOMASS satellite missions by developing algorithms for retrieving changes of vegetation above ground biomass across different landscapes and ecoregions.
Website: http://carbon.jpl.nasa.gov