The below is an ESE PhD defense taking place on Tuesday. There’s also an attached flyer for your reference:

Karoll Quijano

PhD Dissertation Defense

Remote Sensing for Functional Traits and Biophysical Modeling

Major Professors: Dr. Melba Crawford and Dr. John Couture

Tuesday May 26, 2026, at 10:00 AM | Zoom

Ecological Sciences and Engineering Interdisciplinary Graduate Program

Agricultural & Biological Engineering

Abstract:

Plant phenotyping remains a bottleneck for crop improvement because conventional measurements are destructive, labor-intensive, and limited to a few sampling dates per season. The bottleneck is addressed in this dissertation through four studies that connect drone-based LiDAR and hyperspectral remote sensing to field-based measurements and crop growth modeling. In the first study, drone hyperspectral imagery and proximal spectral predictions were used to estimate functional traits associated with water stress and gas exchange in maize at the canopy level. In the second study, trait covariance, not shared chemical structure, was found to control whether modeling multiple plant biochemicals together improves prediction accuracy. In the third study, a method was developed to translate leaf area index across different field instruments using drone-derived features, producing reference-equivalent values from non-destructive measurements. In the fourth study, UAV-based LAI estimates were fed into a crop growth model through the Ensemble Kalman Filter, showing that weekly drone flights can effectively replace per-treatment destructive calibration across different nitrogen conditions.

Amy

Amy Ledman

She/Her/Hers

Lead Graduate Program Specialist Ecological Sciences and Engineering
Office of Interdisciplinary Graduate Programs

Ernest C. Young Hall, Rm 825
155 S. Grant St.
West Lafayette, IN 47907

o: 765-494-5865   f: 765-496-6271

Schedule a meeting: calendly.com/aledman