Welcome to the Soil Sensing and Monitoring Lab! Here is a place for those who love Soil and are interested in hearing Soil Stories.
As US President Franklin Roosevelt once stated, “A nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself.” Soil provides many essential ecosystem functions and services to our planet and plays a vital role in sustaining our society. As a soil scientist, and an associate professor at the Department of Soil Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, my research focuses on the physical and hydrological aspects of soil, its properties, processes, and relationship with the environment and humans.
I received my Ph.D. degree from the University of New South Wales, Australia developing novel non-invasive electromagnetic induction-based technologies and integrating them with mechanistic and empirical models for monitoring soil water and solute transport for irrigation scheduling and soil salinization management. Before joining UW-Madison, I worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales on combining big geospatial datasets and machine learning models to understand the effects of climate change and human disturbance on changes in soil properties and processes since the Industrial Revolution, commonly known as the Anthropocene.
Currently, I am working on several projects following a data-model integration framework. This includes developing novel in situ soil sensors and fusion of ground and remotely sensed big geospatial datasets to improve our ability to monitor, model, and understand the terrestrial water cycles (e.g., soil moisture, evapotranspiration, groundwater) and the coupled carbon (e.g., soil carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions), nutrient (e.g., soil nitrate leaching and management), and energy (e.g., wildfire disturbance on soil ecosystem services) cycles from the field to global scales.
Feel free to contact me (jhuang426@wisc.edu) if you are interested in conducting a research project in my lab or exploring new ideas for potential collaboration.
