Dr. Xiao uses satellite data to measure, monitor, report and verify land use and land cover change in the world, including croplands, grasslands, forests, plantations, wetland, surface water, and urban. He develops satellite-based and data-driven models (e.g., VPM, VPERM, and VTM models) to estimate daily and hourly carbon fluxes (gross primary production, ecosystem respiration) and water fluxes (transpiration) of terrestrial ecosystems. He uses OneHealth (Human-Animal-Environmental Health), Planetary Health, GeoHealth, and Data Science approaches to study ecology and epidemiology of zoonotic and vector-borne infectious diseases (e.g., highly pathogenic avian influenza, tick-borne diseases). He leads a crowdsourcing and citizen science project with the Global Geo-Referenced Field Photo Library (https://www.ceom.ou.edu/photos), where people share, visualize, and archive geo-referenced landscape photos from the fields, and smartphone app “Field Photo 2” for people to takephotos in the fields. As principal investigator or co-investigator, Dr. Xiao has been involved in 68 projects receiving a total of ~US$277 millions from federal agencies (e.g., NSF, NASA, NIH, USDA, USGS, and NOAA) since 1994. He has authored or co-authored 422 peer-reviewed journal papers (as of January 2024, Google Scholar Citations = 34,746, h-index = 103, i10-index = 347).
Dr. Xiao was recognized as "Highly Cited Researchers" in 2021/2022 (in the category of Cross Field) and 2023 (in the category of Geoscience) by the Clarivate (Web of Science), note that "Highly Cited Researchers" are 1 in 1000, of the world population of scientists and social scientists.
Prosser, D., Teitelbaum, C., Yin, S., Hill, N., and Xiao, X., 2023, Climate change impacts on bird migration and highly pathogenic avian influenza, Nature Microbiology
Jia, M., Wang, Z., Mao, D., Ren, C., Song, K., Zhao, C., Wang, C., Xiao, X., and Wang, Y., 2023, Mapping global distribution of mangrove forests at 10-m resolution, Science Bulletin, 1306-1316, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scib.2023.05.004
Meng, Z., Dong, J., Ellis, E.C., Metternicht, G., Qin, Y., Song, X., Lofqvist, S., Garrett, R.D., Jia, X., Xiao, X., 2023, Post-2020 biodiversity framework challenged by cropland expansion in protected areas, Nature Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01093-w
Qin, Y., Xiao, X., Liu, F., Silva, F., Shimabukuro, Y., Arai, E., Fearnside, P., 2023, Forest conservation in indigenous territories and protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon, Nature Sustainability, 6, 295-305, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-01018-z
Qin, Y., Xiao, X., Wigneron, J.P, Ciais, P., Brandt, M. Fan, L., Li, X., Crowell, S., Wu, X., Doughty, R., Zhang, Y., Liu, F., Sitch, S., and Moore, B., 2021, Carbon loss from forest degradation exceeds that from deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, Nature Climate Change, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01026-5.
