Awards, thesis defences, appointments and field activities from the Remote Sensing and Spatial Ecosystem Modeling Laboratory.
Congratulations to our lab members on receiving our graduate department awards: Carolyne and Ryan are awarded Oscar J. Marshall Graduate Scholarship for the 2026-2027 academic year; Frances is awarded the Donald F. Putnam Graduate Scholarship for the 2026-2027 academic year.
Ryan Siu successfully defended his thesis “Rapid Assessment of Aggregate Extraction Ecosystems in Southern Ontario through UAV Remote Sensing.” Thanks to committee members Prof. Tim Duval and Prof. Jue Wang.
PhD student Frances Leung won the Esri Canada Centres of Excellence 2026 Winter Blog Award for her article on creating planetary time-lapses and vegetation index profiles from satellite imagery. Read her regular Esri column.
PhD student Haoxuan (Peter) Ge received second place in the CRSS-SCT 2026 Best Student Oral Presentation competition for “Seasonal Analysis of Suburban Land Surface Temperature and Vegetation Dynamics Using Drone-Based Thermal and Multispectral Remote Sensing,” co-authored with Yuhong He.
Lab alumnus Mitchell Bonney received the Second Best Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing Paper Award at ISPRS 2026 in Toronto for his 2025 paper “Using Landsat Time Series to Investigate Nearly 50 Years of Tree Canopy Cover Change Across an Urban–Rural Landscape in Southern Ontario,” co-authored with Yuhong He. Read the paper.
Dr. Jing Du (PhD, Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, 2026) joined the lab in May 2026 as a postdoctoral fellow for two years. She was selected for the University of Toronto Research Excellence Postdoctoral Fellows Program; our sincere thanks to the Vice-Dean, Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs at UTM.
Carolyne Qiang received the John Horner Graduate Scholarship in Geography; Peter Ge received the Oscar J. Marshall Graduate Fellowship; and Frances Leung received the Griffith Taylor Scholarship in Geography. Thanks to the Graduate Department and the award committees.
Carolyne Qiang, Filip De Braga and Matthew Noonan successfully defended their MSc theses. Our thanks to all the committee members.
Undergraduate students Sana and Hafssa worked with the lab and the City of Mississauga through the CUE Summer Research Award.
Dr. Hwang Lee will start as Instructional Assistant Professor in Geographic Information Science and Technology in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University in summer 2025. Congratulations, Hwang!
Hwang Lee successfully defended his thesis “Investigating Crop Response on Urban Green Roofs Using Close-Range Remote Sensing.” Thanks to co-supervisor Prof. Marney Isaac, external appraiser Prof. Gang Chen, and committee members Profs. Jonathan Li, Damian Maddalena and Adam Martin.
Shuhao Xu successfully defended his thesis “High-Resolution Urban Vegetation Gross Primary Productivity Simulation via Plant Functional Type Unmixing: A Case Study in Toronto, Canada.” Thanks to committee members Prof. Debra Wunch and Prof. Jing Ming Chen.
PhD candidate Hwang Lee received the First Paper Award; incoming MSc student Ryan Siu the Janet Campbell-Booth Scholarship; PhD candidate Haoran Cheng the Teaching Assistant Award; and undergraduate thesis student Sana Hashim the Best Undergraduate Thesis Award and the Ferenc (Ferko) Csillag Memorial Award. MSc student Carolyne Qiang was also awarded an NSERC CGS M Scholarship.
Carolyne Qiang received the B. Harper Bull Scholarship Award from TRCA and an OGS scholarship, and Shuhao Xu received the Climate Positive Energy Graduate Scholarship, supporting their MSc research.
A mid-term group outing arranged by lab manager Haoran. We also said farewell to Yanyu, a visiting PhD student from Zhejiang University, after a year in the lab.
Daniel Nelson successfully defended his MSc thesis “Advancing Wildfire Research Through Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Image Processing Algorithms.” Thanks to chair Prof. Andrea Olive and committee members Profs. Kent Moore and Trevor Porter.
Our summer undergraduate researchers presented their work at UTM’s SURF 2023.
Professor Yuhong He received the Desmond Morton Research Excellence Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement in research and scholarly activity.
Former lab member Mitchell Bonney started a full-time position as Remote Sensing Scientist at ASL Environmental Sciences in Victoria, BC.
Our summer ROP students presented their work at UTM’s SURF 2022, mentored by Mitchell and Hwang. Two projects were conducted with Senior Research Scientists at TRCA and one with Prof. Isaac’s team.
Former lab member Alexander Axiotis started a full-time position as Laboratory Technician in GGE at UTM on June 1, 2022.
A dual group meeting celebrated Alex, Carolyne, Leah and Mitchell completing their undergraduate, MSc and PhD theses, welcomed new members and planned the summer field season.
Carolyne Qiang completed her honours thesis, “Impact of COVID-19 Restrictions on Urban Thermal Environment of Edmonton,” which won the Best Honours Thesis of the year in the GIS and Physical Geography category.
Leah Marajh passed her PhD defence. Thanks to her primary supervisor Prof. Amrita Daniere, committee members Profs. Matthew Adams, Tenley Conway and Sharlene Mollett, and external examiner Prof. Hua Liu.
Alexander Axiotis (MSc) and Phuong Dao (PhD) officially convocated. Congratulations to all 2021 graduates!
New MSc student Daniel Nelson received the Oscar J. Marshall Graduate Fellowship from the Graduate Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto.
PhD candidate Leah Marajh (supervisors Amrita Daniere and Yuhong He) won the first-place Student Presentation Award in the Geographies of Asia panels at the 2021 CAG conference for “Examining local temperature through people and sensors in the Greater Angkor Region of Cambodia.”
Phuong Dao successfully defended his thesis “Investigating Drought Impacts on Plant Functional Traits Using Hyperspectral Remote Sensing.” Thanks to external examiner Prof. Scott Mitchell, internal examiner Prof. Laura Brown, and committee members Profs. Ingo Ensminger, Jing Ming Chen and Peter Kotanen.
Edward Ang (ROP and Work-Study RA) and Carolyne Qiang (ROP and NSERC USRA) joined the lab for the summer to study the impact of COVID-19 on urban physical environments.
A Remote Sensing paper on the Australian bushfires led by PhD student Mitchell Bonney (doi.org/10.3390/rs12233942) received media coverage, including in The Advertiser (Australia).
PhD candidate Phuong Dao received the Oscar J. Marshall Graduate Fellowship, and PhD candidate Leah Marajh the John D. Barnes Geodetic Sciences Fellowship and the COVID-19 Program Completion Award, from the Graduate Department of Geography & Planning. All graduate students in the lab also received Mitacs Research Training Awards for paid training internships.
PhD candidate Mitchell Bonney presented “Dendrochronology vs. Remote Sensing: a time-series comparison of tree rings and Landsat in a temperate forest context” at the first Tree Ring Society Virtual Symposium (watch on YouTube).
Phuong Dao won second place in the Student Honors Paper Competition of the AAG Remote Sensing Specialty Group (2020) for “Improving Hyperspectral Image Segmentation by Applying Inverse Noise Weighting and Outlier Removal for Optimal Scale Selection,” co-authored with Kiran Mantripragada, Yuhong He and Faisal Qureshi.
AAFC Research Scientist Dr. Jiali Shang and Prof. Yuhong He hosted the Precision Agriculture and Remote Sensing Research Network Workshop at UTM on December 5, 2019, with Dr. Craig Drury, Dr. Jiangui Liu (AAFC), Charlie Lalonde (CJ Agren Consulting), Cameron Proctor (U Windsor), Xiaoyong Xu (CPS, UTM) and many students. Supported by the UTM Research Outreach, Conference and Colloquia Fund and GGR@UTM.
PhD candidate Mitchell Bonney received the Oscar J. Marshall Graduate Fellowship, and published his first paper, “Attributing drivers to spatio-temporal changes in tree density across a suburbanizing landscape since 1944,” in Landscape and Urban Planning 192, 103652 (DOI).
Dr. Cameron Proctor started as Assistant Professor at the University of Windsor.
PhD candidate Mitchell Bonney received a two-year NSERC PGS D award and successfully defended his PhD proposal.
The 2019 group workshop and training day for undergraduate research assistants. We welcomed Ali Al Wafi (summer assistant and incoming MSc), ROPs Boyu Xu, David Paredes and Un Leng Wai, CGCS intern Monique Dosanjh and NSERC USRA Zoe Bedford.
Phuong Dao received the UTM Graduate Student Research Award for 2019 and the Geography@UTM First Paper Award for “Maximizing the quantitative utility of airborne hyperspectral imagery for studying plant physiology.” Mitchell Bonney received the Geography@UTM Graduate Student Service and Leadership Award and was elected Graduate Student Representative of the AAG Landscape Specialty Group.
Mitchell Bonney received a Centre for Urban Environments (CUE) research grant for “Monitoring long-term forest change in a suburbanizing landscape using multi-source data.”
The lab was invited by the Blackwood Gallery to take part in the site-specific public art exhibition The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea in Riverside Park, Mississauga, opening perspectives on climate change and resilience. Dr. Cameron Proctor, Mitchell Bonney and Alexander Axiotis demonstrated remote sensing to the public, including many school students.
The book High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing: Data, Analysis, and Applications, co-edited by Dr. Yuhong He and Dr. Qihao Weng, was published by CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group.
First-year PhD student Mitchell Bonney received the Best Oral Presentation Award at the UTM Graduate Research Colloquium 2018 for his talk on monitoring changes in forest health across the urban–rural transition using multi-source data.
Mitchell Bonney gave a talk, “Using satellites to see changes across our landscape,” to 180 Grade 6–8 students at the Let’s Talk Science outreach event at UTM on May 2, 2018.
Dr. Jian Yang received the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad, granted to no more than 500 doctoral students worldwide each year.
Dr. Bing Lu was offered a Senior Remote Sensing Scientist position at Fiera Biological Consulting, Edmonton.
Professor He’s end-of-year group meeting and Christmas lunch.
Professor Yuhong He was recognized with the E. A. Robinson Teaching Excellence Award.
Dr. Cameron Proctor, Dr. Bing Lu and Dr. Jian Yang successfully defended their PhD theses and received their doctoral degrees at Convocation in November 2017.
The lab’s first PhD, Dr. Amy Mui, was offered a tenure-track lecturer position in the Environmental Science Program at Dalhousie University.
Phuong Dao received the CGCS Graduate Student Research Award to support airborne hyperspectral image collection for studying grassland drought.
Bing Lu received a Canadian Remote Sensing Society (CRSS-SCT) travel grant to attend the Earth Observation Summit 2017.
Ms. Stacey English’s Grade 7 class from St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Elementary School took part in a youth outreach program on June 6, 2017, led by RA Darius Wrathall, field technician Phil Rudz, Dr. Amy Mui, Bing Lu and Dr. Yuhong He, learning about physical geography, GIS and remote sensing.
Phuong set up a rain-shelter system in the field and lab to study drought stress on plants with remote sensing, with help from our RAs and field technician Phil.
Group workshop and field training day. Welcome to Dukinna, Kevin, Guillaume, Yang, Joshua and Darius, who joined as ROP, Work-Study and research assistants for the summer.
Assunta (Susie) Saliola started as Education and Research Analyst at Esri Canada; Alexander Tong was offered a geospatial/geoscience position at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Albany, Oregon; and Courtney Soden a soil chemistry technician position at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
Courtney Soden successfully defended her MSc thesis. Welcome to Phuong Duc Dao (PhD student) and Xiangkun Qi (visiting postdoc).
Lab technician Phil Rudz, undergraduate RA Maria Povarova, graduate RA Courtney Soden and Prof. He presented a program on geography, invasive species and remote sensing to the leadership camp at UTM on July 8, 2016, with a Jeopardy-style game and UAV and drone demonstrations.
Bing Lu received the Best Student Paper Award (third place) for “Investigating Species Composition in a Temperate Grassland Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Acquired Imagery” at the 4th International Workshop on Earth Observation and Remote Sensing Applications, Guangzhou, China. Yuhong He was also one of three PIs invited to speak in the “Dishing the Dirt” session of UTM’s annual Lab Liaisons.
Prof. Yuhong He was awarded an NSERC Discovery Grant for another five years: “Quantifying Vegetation Stress from the Leaf to Landscape Scale: Integrating Lab/Field Observations, Radiative Transfer Modelling, and UAV Hyperspectral Imaging System.” Courtney Soden won the 2016 CGCS Graduate Student Research Award.
Prof. He, lab technician Phil Rudz and SAGE president Justin Murfitt ran a program on native and non-native species and ecological technology for “Bring Our Children to Work Day” at UTM, ending with a quad-copter demonstration (drone video). Supported by the Ontario Early Researcher Award outreach program.
The lab organized and chaired sessions at the 2016 AAG annual meeting.
Prof. Yuhong He was invited to join the Editorial Advisory Board of the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, and became a full member of the Graduate Faculty in the School of the Environment, University of Toronto.
End-of-year group meeting and luncheon.
The CFI/ORF-funded UAV–hyperspectral sensor integration was completed, and the first hyperspectral image acquisition with a fixed-wing UAV succeeded, using a lightweight imager from Headwall Photonics.
Our outreach team (Justin, Cameron, Phil, Yuhong and Amy) visited Kendellhurst Academy in Streetsville and worked with Grade 3–7 students on geography and hands-on geoscience technology, supported by Prof. He’s Early Researcher Award.
Amy Mui successfully defended her PhD thesis. Cameron Proctor received an Ontario Graduate Scholarship for 2015–16 following a three-year CGS D; and Prof. Youfei Zheng, Dean of NUIST Reading Academy, visited the lab in the week of July 27.
Prof. Yuhong He received an Ontario Early Researcher Award for a five-year project (2015–2020) to develop a long-term UAV-based system for tracking the Emerald Ash Borer invasion. Justin Murfitt won a CRSS-SCT travel grant to present the EAB results at the 36th Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing, and Amy Mui a NASA-MSU Professional Enhancement Award for the IALE World Congress.
Summer fieldwork training day for undergraduate research assistants.
Prof. He received the NSERC Early Career Researcher Supplement for 2014 and 2015. Justin Murfitt and Siddharth Mishra won full-time summer research internships with the Centre for Global Change Science.
Alexander Tong successfully defended his MSc thesis.
Amy Mui’s presentation “Seasonal changes in core wetland connectivity for a threatened freshwater turtle in southern Ontario” won Best Student Presentation at the 2014 IALE conference in Alaska.
The 2014 group fieldwork training day for undergraduate research assistants.
