Dr. Jan Verbesselt is associate professor in remote sensing at Wageningen University, Laboratory of Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing. He focusses at measuring and understanding ecosystem dynamics by developing novel spatio-temporal methods to detect, monitor and forecast changes using remotely sensed data from in-situ, terrestrial- and airborne LiDAR, and satellite sensors. The application of remotely sensed images for ecological modelling, and collaborative earth science for assessing vegetation, climate, and human impacts take a central place.

Jan is the author of an open-source toolkit, BFAST, providing functionality to detect, monitor and characterise change within satellite image time series ( http://bfast.r-forge.r-project.org/). He has been appointed as Tenure track Professor of remote sensing at Wageningen University coordinating research efforts on change detection and monitoring (2012-ongoing). He has graduated as a Bio-engineer and holds a PhD from the University of Leuven about monitoring vegetation dynamics using satellite data image time series (2006), did a Post-Doc at CSIRO Australia (2007-2010) and continued with EU Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Laboratory of Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing, Wageningen University (2010-2012).

He coordinated a Google research project about the implementation of change monitoring algorithms in the Google Earth Engine. Furthermore, he is currently leading the product development and validation in the ESA Formosa project on forest degradation monitoring using multi-sensor data (Sentinel-2, Rapid-Eye, and Landsat).