Welcome to the Geospatial Digital Informatics Lab
I am Di Yang, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Florida. I am a geographer and programmer focusing on the study of human-environment interactions by using remote sensing images. I am a bridge-builder for closing the gap between the operational uses of scientific remote sensing and GIS techniques and land management practices at the regional scale. The general theme of my work is to gain a quantitative understanding of the relationships between humans, landscape patterns, and ecological processes. Current projects include early NEON science, geospatial modeling, citizen science, and the applications of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) at the macrosystems scale.
The Geospatial Digital Informatics Lab focuses on the study of human-environment interactions through a multi-disciplinary approach combining remote sensing, machine learning, geospatial artificial intelligence, citizen science, and public engagement.
Recent News
September 2026 — The lab’s’ collaborated with Florida Community Innovation to host the NASA data track of the CityCamp Gainesville hackathon! Dr. Di Yang and Olivia Zhang judged 7 projects using the EMERGE curriculum.
July 2026 — The lab’s’ EMERGE initiative partnered with local schools and communities in Guatemala to deliver hands-on citizen science and remote sensing training! Read more here.
April 2026 — PhD student Wei Liu published “Incorporating learned geospatial embeddings to deep image prior for inpainting cloud areas in remotely sensed images” in Remote Sensing. Read it here.
March 2026 — PhD student Shuai Li, along with Dr. Yaqian He, Dr. Di Yang, Dr. Yichan Li, and Wei Liu, published “Incorporating learned geospatial embeddings to deep image prior for inpainting cloud areas in remotely sensed images” in Science of Remote Sensing. Read it here.
February 2026 — The GeoDI Lab hosted the EMERGE NASA Data Hackathon at the University of Florida. See the projects here!
January 2026 — Dr. Di Yang, Dr. Yichan Li, and Peder Nelson hosted a workshop for ForestSAT, “Integrating GLOBE Observer Tree and Land Cover Data with NASA Earth Observations for Environmental Monitoring.”