Dr. Tomas Poblete is Lecturer and Research Fellow in Precision Agriculture & Remote Sensing from the School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences (SAFES), Faculty of Science (FoS). Dr. Poblete is a Bioinformatics Engineer, with a Bachelor in Bioinformatics Science, and a PhD in Agricultural Science. Tomas’s research projects have comprised the use of multispectral and thermal sensors onboard UAVs for agricultural applications. His current research is focused on the implementation of Machine/Deep Learning Algorithms using hyperspectral and thermal imagery in agricultural, biosecurity and forestry applications.

Dr Michael Watt is a Principal Scientist who specialises in remote sensing and development of models to characterise growth, health and wood quality of the forest resource. He has published over 190 refereed papers around these and other topics within forestry. Michael works extensively with the New Zealand forest industry and has a track record of undertaking science that has been adopted by the industry. He is co-leader of the Remote Sensing cluster group which is one of the most well attended industry focus groups within the New Zealand forestry sector. Michael has many international links with other research groups in Europe, Australia and South America.

Chiara Zabeo is a second-year PhD student in the Department for Innovation in Biological, Agro-Food and Forestry Systems in Università degli Studi della Tuscia, in Viterbo, Italy. Coming from a forestry background, her research project is focused on estimation and upscaling of ecosystem functional properties at the local scale through the use of eddy covariance and remote sensing the data; she is currently testing the use of PRISMA, a new hyperspectral satellite by the Italian Space Agency, together with the multi-spectral Planet and Sentinel-2, for both habitat mapping and retrieval of indexes that can be correlated with eddy covariance-derived estimates of ecosystem properties. The current study areas are in Italy (Mediterranean forest and relict temperate plain forest) and Sweden (boreal forest), where at the moment she is a visiting PhD student in SLU (Umeå).

Ilja Vuorinne is pursuing a PhD at the University of Helsinki in Finland. His research interest lies in applying hyperspectral remote sensing for environmental monitoring, focusing on tasks such as invasive species detection and biodiversity mapping

Russell is a Remote Sensing Scientist at Scion in Rotorua, New Zealand, and has a background in multi-sensor and multi-disciplinary remote sensing research in Southern Africa. Presently, his work revolves around the application of hyperspectral and thermal methods for the extraction of phenotypic traits in New Zealand forests.