Wei Liu

Focus Areas:

Country of Origin: China

Degree Program: PhD

Entered Program: Fall 2025

Expected Graduation: Fall 2029

Dissertation Topic: Historical Footprints in Modern Landscapes: Assessing Land Use Legacy Effects on Ecosystem Productivity Using CORONA Imagery

Research Statement: My research focuses on developing innovative methods to understand the legacy effects of historical land use on contemporary ecosystems. Through integrating deep learning algorithms with geospatial analysis, I have developed a novel framework for automated analysis of declassified CORONA satellite imagery from the 1960s, achieving significant improvements in historical land use classification accuracy. My work also explores how these past land use decisions continue to influence current ecosystem productivity through spatially heterogeneous legacy effects. Using geographically weighted regression models, I examine the complex mechanisms through which historical land use patterns shape modern ecosystem functions. This research provides both methodological advances in processing historical remote sensing data and theoretical insights into long-term human-environment interactions, contributing to our understanding of sustainable landscape management

Adviser: Dr. Di Yang

Educational Background

  • M.S. in Geography, University of Florida, 2025
  • B.S. in Geographic Information Science, Beijing Forestry University, 2022

Recent Publications

Liu, W., & Yang, D. (2026). Century-Scale Earth Observation: Systematic Review of Georeferencing Methods for Historical Aerial and Satellite Imagery. Remote Sensing, 18(7), 1052.

Li, S., Yang, D., He, Y., Parazoo, N., & Liu, W. (2026). The impact of land cover change-climate interactions on ecosystem productivity in the Arctic-Boreal region. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 383, 111137.

Li, S., He, Y., Yang, D., Li, Y., & Liu, W. (2026). Incorporating learned geospatial embeddings to deep image prior for inpainting cloud areas in remotely sensed images. Science of Remote Sensing, 100404.

Nawaz, T., Ismail Ansari, M. G., Avirmed, B., Zhao, T., Liu, W., Lian, J., ... & Yu, Q. (2025). Ecological network optimization and its correlation with net primary productivity in the Thal Desert: a 20-year analysis. Geo-spatial Information Science, 1-25.

Li, S., Yang, D., He, Y., Parazoo, N., & Liu, W. (2025). The biogeophysical impacts of land cover change on climate extremes in the Arctic and Boreal regions. Environmental Research Letters, 20(8), 084057.

Liu, W., Li, S., Fan, D., Wen, Y., Madson, A., Mitchell, J., ... & Yang, D. (2025). A Deep Learning Workflow for CORONA-based Historical Land Use Classifications. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing.

Xu, C., Chen, X., Yu, Q., Avirmed, B., Zhao, J., Liu, W., & Sun, W. (2024). Relationship between ecological spatial network and vegetation carbon use efficiency in the Yellow River Basin, China. GIScience & Remote Sensing, 61(1), 2318070.