Hello

I am a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Ying Sun's lab, starting in February 2025. My research interests focus on understanding the coupled processes between radiative transfer, plant growth and soil water/heat dynamics within the Soil-Plant-Atmosphere Continuum (SPAC) system, including (1) Solar-induced Chlorophyll Fluorescence (SIF) and radiative transfer model; (2) soil moisture and crop growth data assimilation with field or remote sensing data; (3) crop phenotyping (e.g., above-ground biomass) extraction based on deep learning. My current research is to explore intercontinental differences of tropical rainforest responses to climate variability.

About me

Before joining Sun’s lab, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, where I worked on developing the STEMMUS-SCOPE land surface model under the supervision of Bob Su and Yijian Zeng. I earned my Ph.D. in 2022 from Wuhan University, China, under the guidance of Prof. Jinzhong Yang and Yuanyuan Zha. Throughout my Ph.D. and first postdoctoral research, I have gained extensive experience in plant-environment interactions, optical remote sensing of vegetation growth (at both satellite and drone scales), agroecosystem modeling, data assimilation, deep learning, and SIF measurements and simulations.

Selected publications:

Yu, D., Yang, J., Shi, L., Zhang, Q., Huang, K., Fang, Y., & Zha, Y. (2019). On the uncertainty of initial condition and initialization approaches in variably saturated flow modeling. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 23(7), 2897-2914
Yu, D., Zha, Y., Shi, L., Jin, X., Hu, S., Yang, Q., Huang, K., Zeng, W. (2020). Improvement of sugarcane yield estimation by assimilating UAV-derived plant height observations. European Journal of Agronomy, 121, 126159.
Yu, D., Zha, Y., Shi, L., Bolotov, A., & Tso, C. H. M. (2021). Spatiotemporal sampling strategy for characterization of hydraulic properties in heterogeneous soils. Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment, 35, 737-757.
Yu, D., Zha, Y., Shi, L., Hao, Y., Zhang, Y. (2022). Improving sugarcane growth simulations by integrating multi-source observations into a crop model. European Journal of Agronomy, 132, 126410.
Yu, D., Zha, Y., Sun, Z., Li, J., Jin, X., Zhu, W., ... & Su, Z. (2023). Deep convolutional neural networks for estimating maize above-ground biomass using multi-source UAV images: a comparison with traditional machine learning algorithms. Precision Agriculture, 24(1), 92-113.