Shadman Amin

Shadman Amin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at UC Santa Barbara, co-advised by Kelly Caylor and Anna Trugman. His dissertation examines the dynamics of sparse woodlands in semi-arid drylands, with a focus on coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia) at the Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve.

His field program combines repeat LiDAR surveys, thermal and multispectral imagery from uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), and sap flow measurements. Shadman designed and built a LoRa and Starlink telemetry system that provides continuous monitoring from the remote field site. He is also developing a UAV-based pipeline for estimating evapotranspiration (ET), and he is testing several ET models (PT-JPL, STIC, MOD16, TSEB, and SSEBop) against flux tower data.

A second line of his work treats the scaling of water, energy, and carbon fluxes as an information problem. The central question is how much sub-pixel heterogeneity can still be recovered after fine-scale observations are aggregated to coarser resolutions. Shadman also mentors undergraduate researchers from Electrical and Computer Engineering, Data Science, and Geography.

Shadman grew up in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He attended United World College Changshu China and earned a B.A. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Colby College. Before graduate school, he worked for five years as an A/V technician, deployment administrator, and computer hardware technician. That experience shapes his hands-on approach to building field instruments.