Lab & Field Infrastructure:
Dr. Verdi’s research lab is equipped with cutting-edge lab facilities and excellent field research infrastructure to support a wide range of research and extension projects. We are currently focusing on four major research themes including urban and agricultural irrigation & water management, soil hydrology, remote sensing, and advanced data mining.
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Urban & Agricultural Irrigation Management: available infrastructure for field research trials includes several fully automated sprinkler irrigation research sites in southern and central California (more than 350 research plots) to conduct irrigation studies mainly on urban landscape species. The plots are all equipped with solenoid valves controlling pop-up sprinkler heads while irrigation scheduling is done via state of the art smart irrigation controllers.
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Remote Sensing & Geospatial Data Mining: Available remote sensing equipment includes a multispectral-thermal unmanned aerial system plus standalone and handheld remote sensing devices including thermal and multispectral sensors and cameras (e.g. RedEdge multispectral camera, FLIR Duo Pro R Thermal camera, and FLIR and Seek handheld Thermal cameras).
We have access to a suite of software products including Neurosolutions, Matlab, ARCGIS Pro, Pix4D Mapper, and SAS for machine learning, geospatial, geostatistical and statistical analyses. In addition, our lab is equipped with two high powered Dell Precision Towers (128GB RAM) with Windows 10 Pro 64-bit operating systems to run computationally intensive modeling tasks. |
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Soil Hydrology: available equipment to study soil physical and hydraulic properties includes bench top instrument (e.g. WP4Cs, HYPROPs, KSAT and PARIOs), as well as field instrument, sensors and data loggers (e.g. SATURO, TDT, TDR, MPS6, and Watermark soil moisture sensors, EM50, and Data snapshot loggers). Additional facilities include extensive electronic and general lab tools, 3D printer, lab oven, and sieve set.
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Plant physiology: Available sensors and equipment include 1515D pressure chamber instrument, Accupar LP-80 Canopy Intercept & Area Index sensor, SC-1 Leaf Porometer Stomatal Conductance sensor and WinRHIZO root imaging system.
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