NASA Postdoctoral Program - Remote sensing applications for mapping and monitoring global forest carbon stock and dynamics

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This postdoc opportunity is for candidates with special interest in the remote sensing of global forest carbon dynamics. The successful candidate will work with optical and microwave remote sensing data to estimate and map above ground forest structure, biomass, and changes driven by anthropogenic and climate forcing. The candidate will participate with a team of scientists conducting original research using various statistical and machine learning approaches to develop regional and global products and improve our understanding of the drivers of carbon stock changes across a variety of ecosystems. The candidate will collaborate with the team to integrate a series of optical and microwave/radar satellite imagery with airborne and satellite lidar measurements of forest structure and conventional ground-based forest inventory data to map and monitor changes of forest structure and biomass and attribute the changes to land use activities and environmental effects. The selected candidate may also engage with mapping forest disturbance, fire fuel loads, and biomass carbon change across various forest ecosystems, and may further analyze data products to improve ecosystem and fire modeling. The candidate will help improve the quantification of the global carbon cycle as a result of human and climate-induced changes and better understand the short-term and long-term responses of ecosystems to climate change.