Dr. Nicola Falco is a Research Scientist and Deputy Head of the Integrated Ecosystem Sciences Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Area (EESA). He is also serves as Co-Lead of the Sustainable Agriculture Program at EESA.

Dr. Falco specializes in developing cutting-edge remote sensing and machine learning approaches to better understand ecosystems and monitor environmental change. His work bridges advanced technology and ecological science, helping reveal how natural and human-driven processes shape the environment. With more than 15 years of experience in signal and image processing techniques, hyperspectral imaging, LiDAR data analysis, and machine learning, Dr. Falco applies state-of-the-art computational techniques to enhance the detection, modeling, and prediction of ecological processes and their spatial-temporal dynamics. His research emphasizes the integration of multi-scale and multi-source data—including remote sensing, geophysics, in situ sensor networks, and ground-based observations—to investigate ecosystem drivers and upscale key ecological properties from local measurements to landscape and regional scales.

Dr. Falco’s expertise spans a wide range of applications, including species composition and biodiversity assessment, vegetation health monitoring, biomass and carbon quantification, and land surface change detection. He has made significant contributions to signal and image processing in remote sensing, with particular strengths in mathematical morphology, pattern recognition, machine learning, and hyperspectral image classification. His work also includes multi-temporal analysis and change detection in optical imagery.

Dr. Falco earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Trento, Italy, in 2008 and 2011, respectively. He received a joint Ph.D. (Cotutelle) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Iceland and in Information and Communication Technologies from the University of Trento in 2015. Prior to joining LBNL, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Signal Processing Laboratory in the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Iceland.