Awards
- 2024 UTRA, Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award, Brown University
- 2022 NSF REU, Washington State University, Stakeholder Informed Modeling of Innovations in the Food-Energy-Water Nexus
AB, Geology-Biology from Brown University
Duncan Jurayj is a research assistant in the Hydrology, Land Cover, and Climate Change Lab at the University of Michigan. He is interested in how hydroclimate influences plants and land-atmosphere water fluxes. His research focuses on using LiDAR and microwave remote sensing to map ecosystem water and carbon storage. Currently, he is developing methods for retrieving full-waveform LiDAR variables using vegetation optical depth (VOD) from SMAP, and integrating LiDAR and VOD observations to estimate vegetation water storage globally. Previously, he has investigated spatial patterns of LiDAR-derived vegetation vertical complexity in boreal North America, examining their relationship to satellite phenological signals and developing an algorithm for the continuous mapping of this full-waveform canopy structural metric.
Publications
- *Jurayj D, Bowers R, Fayne JV. 2024 “Phenology and Plant Functional Type Link Optical Properties of Vegetation Canopies to Patterns of Vertical Vegetation Complexity” MDPI Remote Sensing https://doi.org/10.3390/rs16142577
- *Jurayj D, Fayne JV. [in review] “Refining Estimates of Vegetation Water Storage from SMAP L-band VOD using GEDI Canopy Height Observations”, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing. {preprint: https://doi.org/10.36227/techrxiv.176127451.19391790/v1}