Niall Hanan

Professor, Plant and Environmental Sciences

Regular Faculty

Skeen Hall N348,

MSC 3Q,

Las Cruces, NM 88011

nhanan@nmsu.edu

575-646-3335

Website

My group (the savanna lab, in PES) is working on image-based plant community characterization using deep learning, traversing scales from regional-continental using very high resolution (35 cm) satellite imaging to assess vegetation structure, to ground based cameras to detect vital rates of annual plant seedling emergence, growth and mortality. We have also put considerable effort into interpretable machine learning approaches that emphasize ecological insight as the key missing-link in many ecological analyses that focus only on (over) fitting predictive models.
Selected papers, last 5 years:
DOI: 10.1111/2041-210X.13686
DOI: 10.1038/d41586-020-02830-3
DOI: DOI: 10.3390/rs12091436
DOI: 10.3389/fenvs.2020.00004
DOI: 10.5194/bg-17-1281-2020