Lei Song

Dr. Lei Song is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Previously, she served as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the SCALE Lab, contributing to projects like BioFI and DISES ECOPLAN. She holds an PhD and MA in Geography from Clark University, along with an MS in Applied Meteorology and BS in Geographic Information Science from Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology.

Research Interests: Lei Song specializes in species conservation, human-wildlife interactions, and sustainable land use planning. Her methodological toolkit includes Remote Sensing (RS), Geographic Information Science (GIScience), and Machine Learning (ML) for land cover analysis. She focuses on terrestrial ecosystems, species distribution modeling, and landscape connectivity assessment, particularly in Tanzania with African savanna elephants.

Key Contributions: Lei developed the itsdm R package for presence-only species distribution modeling using Isolation Forest algorithms. Her work bridges climate change and ecological impacts through data-driven strategies. Publications show expertise in AI applications for global drought forecasting, cropland mapping, and environmental outlier detection.

Scientific Awards:

• Principal Investigator, NASA FINESST Program Grant #80NSSC20K1640

Collaborations: Dr. Song collaborates with researchers including Dr. Amy Frazier (UCSB), Dr. Andrew Estes (Clark University), and David Cortes (software development). Her work spans interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of ecology, climate science, and AI.