OVERALL RESEARCH PROGRAM
The number, degree, and duration of plant stressors are increasing under climate change. Plant environmental stress manifests as alterations to individual plant ecophysiology, and its effects can spread to larger spatial scales and affect entire ecosystems. The plant-disturbance interactions are spatio-temporally heterogeneous and are challenging to monitor over large spatial scales. Such challenges can be overcome using remote sensing data. Dao Lab explores how plant-disturbance interactions and plant chemical response at the species level impact plant health, growth, and functioning by integrating multi-source remote sensing, high-throughput plant phenotyping, geospatial science, genetic and molecular methods, biological modeling, and machine learning.

Areas of Interest
​Plant ecophysiology, plant-disturbance interactions, precision agriculture, invasive species, biodiversity, remote sensing, geomatic engineering, geospatial science, machine learning, data fusion, image processing, object-based image analysis

News and Updates

10/2024: Dr. Phuong Dao joined the Editorial Board of the Agrosystems, Geosciences & Environment (AGE) journal (an official journal of the ASA, CSSA, and SSSA societies) as an Associate Editor.
10/2024: We are happy to share that the paper "Unlocking Ecological Insights from Subseasonal Visible-to-Shortwave Infrared Imaging Spectroscopy: The SHIFT Campaign" that Dr. Phuong Dao co-authors has been accepted for publication in the Ecosphere journal.
10/2024: Dr. Phuong Dao shares our group's research on the use of remote sensing, high-throughput plant phenotyping, and AI in plant health research as a featured speaker, among other exemplary plant scientists James Schnable (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Karansher Singh Sandhu (Bayer Crop Science), Thelma Madzima (Michigan State University), David Hessel (Corteva), and many others, at the CSU-Corteva Plant Adaptation Symposium.
10/2024: Our group's master student Sai Pennam presented his research on plant diseases using high-throughput plant phenotyping and deep learning at the CSU-Corteva Plant Adaptation Symposium. Journal publication from this research is coming soon. Great job Sai!​
09/2024: Lunch time with USDA-ARS team to celebrate the success of our first field data collection campaign of the sugar beet disease project.
09/2024: Dr. Phuong Dao is part of the team of the College of Agricultural Sciences to welcome and introduce our research in Digital Agriculture to the delegate from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and Universities from Romania. The meeting was also to discuss the establishment of faculty and student exchange and collaboration programs between CSU and Romanian Universities with funding from EU.
09/2024: Dr. Phuong Dao is invited to be a featured speaker at the upcoming Corteva Agriscience Plant Adaptation Symposium on October 4. The aims of this symposium is to connect big data, genetics and field phenotyping applications to improve the quality of our crops and their tolerance to stress, which is vital in this time of climate change that demands sustainable solutions. Dr. Dao's talk will focus on advanced lab-based plant phenotyping, field drone phenotyping, and AI in plant health and plant stress research and plant breeding.
08/2024: Congratulations to Dao Lab's undergraduate student Mike Russo for being awarded the prestigious NASA DEVELOP Internship for the Fall 2024. We look forward to seeing fruitful research outcomes from his internship.
08/2024: We are thrilled to share that Dr. Phuong Dao was recently awarded a USDA-NIFA grant ($500,000) to develop and implement an advanced high-throughput plant phenotyping system and associated research program. The phenotyping system offers rapid and precise real-time analyses of plant phenotypes impacted by pests, diseases, beneficial microbial communities, pesticides, and other biotic and abiotic stress. The system and its associated research are expected to accerlate our research and development in Digital and Climate-Smart Agriculture at Colorado State University. Furthermore, the system also allows us to train the next-generation agricultural scientists who are able to develop and apply digital technologies and data science in agricultural applications.
08/2024: Dr. Phuong Dao completed a 1-day Climate Across the Curriculum workshop hosted by the CSU Climate Initiative. This training program is designed to help instructors and faculty incorporate climate research, education, and discussion into their classrooms. ​The goal is to enhance students' and faculty's foundational knowledge of climate change and to leverage their academic expertise to foster climate-related discussions and initiatives on campus.
​07/2024: We are pleased to share that our paper "Imaging spectroscopy reveals topographic variability effects on grassland functional traits and drought responses" led by Dr. Phuong Dao has been accepted for publication in the Spectral Biology Special Feature in the Ecology journal.
07/2024: Our research on Colorado wheat diseases is highlighted by CSU STRATA. In this project, we aim to develop a spectral database and a lab-to-field multimodal machine learning model/computer program for Colorado wheat disease detection and management. We also evaluate the potential of the technologies for practical applications at commercial scales. We would like to thank the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade for the funding support.

Highlights in Linkedin
06/2024: We are thrilled to share that our 5-year USDA-ARS funded project "​BeetPAI: AI-enabled hyperspectral phenotyping to accelerate sugar beet breeding" (in collaboration with Dr. Kevin Dorn) has been launched. In this project, we integrate greenhouse experiments (with a high-throughput phenotyping) with field experiments (with drone hyperspectral imaging) to characterize sugar beet and disease interactions and to evaluate the scalability/transferability of our approach.

We would like to thank USDA-ARS for the funding support and collaboration. We look forward to conducting this innovative and impactful project.
06/2024: We are pleased to share our latest study on characterizing insect-plant interactions and insect feeding behavior through electrical penetration graphic signal using deep learning. A great collaboration between our group at Colorado State University, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, and Indiana State University. The paper is under review in PLOS Computational Biology.

More details: check out our Preprint
06/2024: Congratulations to our Master Student Sydney Hedberg (Dr. Dao co-advises with Dr. Alan Knapp) for successfully defending her thesis entitled "Assessing Drought Sensitivity Across the Shortgrass Steppe Biome". Well-done Sydney!

Best of luck in your future academic/professional endeavours!
06/2024: Congratulations to our Postdoc Research Associate Nga Nguyen for her new journey as a Senior Research Associate at the Alliance of Bioversity International and International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

Best of luck in your future academic/professional endeavours!
05/2024: Dr. Phuong Dao gave an invited Tech Talk entitled "Digital Transformation in Agriculture with Hyperspectral Imaging and Artificial Intelligence" at the Ireland’s National Centre for AI (CeADAR), University College Dublin, Ireland​.
04/2024: Congratulations to Dao Lab's undergraduate researcher Emma Hoopes for winning one of the two "Excellence in Data Science Research" awards from the Data Science Research Institute for her presentation in Hyperspectral Remote Sensing and Machine Learning in crop disease detection and characterization at CSU undergraduate student symposium. This is an extremely competitive award since there were over 340 presentations across campus.
04/2024: Our undergraduate student Emma Hoopes presented her research (co-authored by Sai Pennam) at Colorado State University CURC student symposium using machine learning and close-range hyperspectral imaging in plant disease detection and characterization in collaboration with Dr. Kevin Dorn from USDA. Her research is supported by USDA-ARS and the Undergraduate Research Fellowship from the the College of Agricultural Sciences. Emma's presentation and poster can be found HERE.
03/2024: We successfully conduct the first field flight with our group's new HySpex Mjolnir VS-620 hyperspectral system (490 bands from 400-2500 nm) together with a LiDAR sensor from CSU Drone Center.​
02/2024: HySpex Mjolnir VS-620 hyperspectral system (490 bands from 400-2500 nm) is finally here in our Lab. Testing and mission planning are done. The system is ready to take off. Can't wait to do exciting precision agriculture research in the coming months/years.
02/2024: We are happy to share that our proposal "Multiscale automatic plant disease detection and rating with hyperspectral remote sensing" has been funded by Western Sugar Cooperative. We excited to implement this impactful project in collaboration with USDA-ARS Fort Collins.
12/2023: We are pleased to share that the Agricultural Data Science minor program and two new courses Agricultural Data Science and Geographic Information Systems in Agriculture that Dr. Phuong Dao developed and is leading have been approved and will be launched in the Fall 2024. This is a great opportunity for students to advance their skills and knowledge in the applications of data science and data analytics in Agriculture.
11/2023: Congratulations to our undergraduate researcher Emma Hoopes on being awarded the CAS Undergraduate Research Fellowship from the College of Agricultural Sciences. Emma will conduct her internship project that uses hyperspectral remote sensing and data science to assess and characterize viral diseases in Colorado winter wheat in Dao Lab in Spring 2024.
11/2023: We are happy to share that our proposal "Developing a Commercial High-Throughput Crop Disease Monitoring System with Drone Hyperspectral Imaging and Machine Learning" has been funded by the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT) through the Advanced Industries Proof-of-Concept grant program, administered by STRATA.
09/2023: Dao Lab has been awarded two grants from Colorado Wheat Research Foundation (CWRF) to study diseases and weed herbicide resistance in wheat production system using drone hyperspectral remote sensing and machine learning.
01/2023: We are thrilled to share that Dr. Phuong Dao will be joining the Department of Agricultural Biology at Colorado State University as an Assistant Professor of Computational Agricultural Biology (focusing on remote sensing of precision agriculture) from August 2023. Dr. Dao will also lead the development of the Undergraduate Minor program in Agricultural Data Science of the department.
01/2023: Dr. Phuong Dao attends and presents his research at another interesting winter symposium of the NSF-ASCEND Biology Integration Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
12/2022: Dr. Phuong Dao presents his study on "Assessing Genetically-Controlled Chemical Defense in Trembling Aspen in Response to Insect Herbivore Impact with Imaging Spectroscopy and LiDAR Data​" at American Geophysical Union Fall meeting.
01/2022: Dr. Phuong Dao receives the National Best PhD Thesis Award for his PhD thesis "Investigating Drought Impacts on Plant Functional Traits Using Hyperspectral Remote Sensing" from the Canadian Remote Sensing Society.
02/2022: Dr. Phuong Dao has joined the Austral Ecology journal (formerly known as Australian Journal of Ecology, an official journal of the Ecological Society of Australia) editorial board from 2022 and will serve as an associate editor for 2 years.
06/2021: Dr. Phuong Dao successfully defends his PhD thesis entitled "Investigating Drought Impacts on Plant Functional Traits Using Hyperspectral Remote Sensing" at the University of Toronto.
​*** Welcome to the Dao HyperAI Lab's website ***