Xiangming Xiao (萧向明), Ph.D.
Professor, School of Biological Sciences, Director, Center for Earth Observation and Modeling, and Associate Director, IREES
Email: xiangming.xiao@ou.edu
Xiangming Xiao is a Professor of Ecology and Remote Sensing at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Oklahoma (OU). He had B.Sc. in Biology from Xiamen University, Xiamen, China (1982), M.Sc. in Ecology from the University of Science and Technology, Beijing, China (1987), and Ph.D. in Ecosystem Science from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA (1994). He worked at the Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts and the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, MIT (1994-1997), and the University of New Hampshire (1997-2008). Dr. Xiao leads the Center for Earth Observation and Modeling (CEOM) at OU, and the Center's research portfolio covers three focused areas: (1) land-cover and land-use change, (2) terrestrial carbon cycle, biodiversity, water resources, and climate, and (3) OneHealth (Human-Animal-Environmental Health) and Planetary Health/GeoHealth. As principal investigator or co-investigator, Dr. Xiao has been involved in 68 projects receiving a total of ~US$277 millions from federal agencies (e.g., NSF, NASA, NIH, USDA, USGS, and NOAA) since 1994. He has authored or co-authored over 400 peer-reviewed journal papers and book chapters (Google Scholar Citations = 30,460, h-index = 93, i10-index = 313). Dr. Xiao uses satellite data to measure, monitor, report and verify the spatial-temporal dynamics of cropland, grassland, forest, plantation, wetland, surface water, and urban in the world. He develops satellite-based VPM, VPERM, and VTM models to estimate daily carbon fluxes (gross primary production, ecosystem respiration) and water fluxes (transpiration) of terrestrial ecosystems. He uses OneHealth, Planetary Health/GeoHealth, and Big Data Science approaches to study ecology and epidemiology of zoonotic and vector-borne infectious diseases (e.g., highly pathogenic avian influenza, tick-borne diseases). He leads a crowdsourcing and citizen science project with the Global Geo-Referenced Field Photo Library (https://www.ceom.ou.edu/photos), where people share, visualize, and archive geo-referenced landscape photos from the fields, and smartphone app “Field Photo 2” for people to take photos in the fields. The CEOM manages a data portal with 1+ petabyte online data storage (https://www.ceom.ou.edu), which hosts several global data products, e.g., annual maps of open surface water bodies during 1984-2018 at 30-m spatial resolution and gross primary production and transpiration of vegetation during 2000-2022 at 500-m resolution. Dr. Xiao serves as associate Editor-in-Chief for Frontiers of Earth Sciences journal, subject-matter editor for Ecological Applications journal, and a review editor for EcoHealth journal. He teaches the Environmental Remote Sensing course for graduate and undergraduate students. Dr. Xiao received OU George Lynn Cross Research Professorship in 2018, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Research, Education, and Economics (REE) Under Secretary's Award in 2019, and OU Regents' Award for Superior Research and Creative/Scholarly Activity in 2023. Dr. Xiao was also recognized as "Highly Cited Researchers in the field of Cross-Field" in 2021 and 2022 by the Clarivate (Web of Science), note that "Highly Cited Researchers" are 1 in 1000, of the world population of scientists and social scientists.
