Biography
My research interests lie at the confluence of remote sensing, GIScience, and biogeography. My current research focuses on computational remote sensing of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics at local to global spatial scales, and daily to decadal temporal scales. I am particularly interested in advancing computational remote sensing paradigms in characterizing land surface patterns and processes, underlying mechanisms, and subsequent feedbacks to the atmosphere. My work combines remote sensing, process-based models, field observations, artificial intelligence, high-performance and cloud computing, to study ecosystem structures, functions, and responses to climate change and human activities. My ongoing research traverses varying types of ecosystems, including natural (e.g., forest), human-dominated (e.g., agriculture), and disturbed (e.g., species invasion) ecosystems. Current research foci include computational remote sensing, multi-scale land surface phenology, intelligent agriculture, and invasive species and biodiversity.
Awards and Honors
2024 AAG Fellow
2024 UIUC I. C. Gunsalus Scholar
2023 UCGIS Early/Mid-Career Research Award
2023 UIUC Teacher Ranked as Excellent
2022 CPGIS Young Scholar Award
2021 NSF CAREER Award
2021 NASA Early Career Investigator Award
2020 AAG Early Career Scholars in Remote Sensing Award
2019 Microsoft AI for Earth Award
2019 UIUC Teacher Ranked as Excellent
2018 UIUC Arnold O. Beckman Research Award
2018 UIUC Teacher Ranked as Excellent
2017 ASPRS Robert N. Colwell Memorial Fellowship
Courses Taught
GGIS 477 - Intro to Remote Sensing
GGIS 478 - Techniques of Remote Sensing
GGIS 489 - Programming for GIS
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Professor, Geography and Geographic Information Science
Recent Publications
Lyu, F., Yang, Z., Diao, C., & Wang, S. (2025). Multistream STGAN: A Spatiotemporal Image Fusion Model With Improved Temporal Transferability. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 18, 1562-1576. https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2024.3506879
Tian, J., Wang, L., Diao, C., Zhang, Y., Jia, M., Zhu, L., Xu, M., Li, X., & Gong, H. (2025). National scale sub-meter mangrove mapping using an augmented border training sample method. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 220, 156-171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2024.12.009
Wang, L., Diao, C., & Lu, Y. (2025). The role of remote sensing in species distribution models: a review. International Journal of Remote Sensing, 46(2), 661-685. https://doi.org/10.1080/01431161.2024.2421949
Diao, C., Augspurger, C. K., Zhao, Y., & Salk, C. F. (2024). A satellite-field phenological bridging framework for characterizing community-level spring forest phenology using multi-scale satellite imagery. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 211, 83-103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2024.03.018
Liu, Y., Diao, C., Mei, W., & Zhang, C. (2024). CropSight: Towards a large-scale operational framework for object-based crop type ground truth retrieval using street view and PlanetScope satellite imagery. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 216, 66-89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2024.07.025