Di Yang

Dr. Di Yang is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Florida and Principal Investigator of the Geospatial Digital Informatics (GeoDI) Lab. Her research uses geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI), remote sensing, and citizen science to turn imperfect Earth observations into reliable evidence about how land is changing and what that change means for climate, ecosystems, and human health.

Her group works along three connected lines. First, recovering information lost in time and hidden under clouds: her team built the first deep-learning workflow that turns declassified 1960s CORONA satellite photographs into accurate land-use maps, and the first use of planet-scale geospatial foundation model embeddings (AlphaEarth) to reconstruct cloud-covered imagery without training data. Second, land change and climate: by placing satellite-observed land cover into the Community Earth System Model (CESM2), her team showed how forest loss and shrub expansion alter climate extremes and ecosystem productivity across the Arctic-Boreal region. Third, citizen science and environmental health: as lead PI of NASA-funded projects, she established when volunteer observations can be trusted as AI training data, led the citizen-based analysis of the 2020 western U.S. migratory bird die-off, and now forecasts mosquito-borne disease risk by combining NASA GLOBE Observer reports, NASA Earth observations, and Earth system models.

Dr. Yang is lead PI of a NASA Early Career award on land-use legacy and fire regimes and a NASA Citizen Science for Earth Systems Program award. She has secured about 9 million core-hours of NCAR supercomputing, serves on the editorial board of Scientific Reports, is a NASA DEVELOP Science Advisor and NASA Science Activation Subject Matter Expert, and founded EMERGE, an open citizen science and GeoAI education program active across Florida and in Guatemala. She has published nearly 60 peer-reviewed articles and co-edits the Springer Nature volume Citizen Earth. She earned her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Florida (2019) and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montana before joining the University of Wyoming as Assistant Professor (2020 to 2024).

Open to collaboration. Dr. Yang welcomes partners in ecology, public health, climate science, computer science, engineering, and the social sciences who want to bring satellite data, AI, or community-collected observations into their work, as well as agencies, extension offices, and community organizations seeking data-driven environmental monitoring. Her lab shares code, data, and open textbooks. Contact: yangdi1031@ufl.edu, geodi.geog.ufl.edu.