Welcome to the Ecological SENSING Lab (Spatiotemporal ENvironmental Sensing). We are a research laboratory in the Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Management at the University of New Brunswick.
We leverage plant ecophysiology and remote sensing across scales from individual leaves, to plants, canopies, and regions to assess and quantify plant dynamics across short- (minutes to days) and long-term timescales (weeks to seasons, and years).
We are interested in understanding how plants respond to their environment to develop scalable applications for understanding ecosystem health, productivity, and stress response.
To understand plant dynamics and develop scalable applications, it is crucial to leverage technologies and expertise across plant sciences, ecophysiology, surveys, and remote sensing. We use remote sensing tools across platforms from ground-based handheld instruments and towers, to airborne drones and planes, to satellites. We leverage passive optical sensors - multispectral, hyperspectral, thermal, and solar-induced fluorescence - and active sensors - LiDAR and radar. These sensors provide a suite of physiological and structural information about plants and ecosystems to assess their dynamics.
Remote sensing enables the extraction of direct and indirect plant and ecosystem characteristics, traits, and functions. We can assess and quantify plant processes across space and time. Some examples of the applications in the Ecological SENSING Lab includes: monitoring carbon cycle dynamics in forests and wetlands (carbon uptake and storage), quantifying productivity and growth response across management strategies (thinning), determining genotypic and species level response to drought for screening tolerance and resilience, mapping and tracking invasive plants, assessing ecosystem disturbance risk, severity, and recovery (pests, wildfire).