Biography

Dr. Nicola Falco is a Research Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division (CESD) and member of the Environmental Geophysics group.

Dr. Falco’s research focuses on the development and application of novel remote sensing and geophysical techniques for ecosystem characterization with particular emphasis on a) improving the characterization and prediction of ecological processes and their dynamics; b) machine learning for multi-scale and multi-source data integration (e.g., remote sensing, geophysics, and in situ sensor network) to investigate ecosystem drivers; c) investigating surface and subsurface processes by integrating and scaling critical ecosystem properties from point measurements to large scale. He has been working on developing the Ecoimaging concept, which focuses on multi-source data analysis and integration techniques for the simultaneous characterization of aboveground and belowground properties.

His expertise spans across disciplines including remote sensing, signal/image processing, mathematical morphology, advance pattern recognition, and machine learning. He has several contributions in image classification for land-cover/land-use (LCLU) mapping, change detection (multi-temporal) analysis and multi-source data integration as well as optimization of multi-scale techniques for the extraction and integration of spectral and contextual information.

Dr. Falco was born in Verona, Italy. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Trento, Italy, in 2008 and 2011, respectively. He holds a joint Ph.D. degree (Cotutelle) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Iceland and in Information and Communication Technologies from the University of Trento obtained in 2015. Before joining LBNL, he spent one year as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Signal Processing Laboratory of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty at the University of Iceland (2015-2016).