Dr. Ruiliang Pu is currently an Associate Professor with the School of Geosciences, University of South Florida (USF). He earned a Ph.D. (Cartography & Geographic Information System) in 2000, conducted at University of California at Berkeley, from Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was a visiting scholar in Institute for Space and Terrestrial Sciences, Ontario, Canada and a visiting scholar at The University of Calgary.He was an Assistant Researcher at UC Berkeley, and a Visiting Research Scientist with Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland at College Park before moving to University of South Florida (USF) in 2006. His research experience and interests are in remote sensing, GIS and spatial statistics with direct applications to natural hazard monitoring, land use/cover change detection, biophysical and biochemical parameters extraction, and coastal and terrestrial ecosystems modeling. He has published more than 82 (41 related to hyperspectral remote sensing application studies on vegetation/plants