Wim van Leeuwen has been a research scientist and a member of the MODIS land science team, has worked on global spectral vegetation index and albedo products and algorithm development in the US and France. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He has more than 20 years of geospatial research and remote sensing science experience and is the director of the Arizona Remote Sensing Center at the University of Arizona. His research interests focus on multi-platform remote sensing data fusion and geospatial product development for resource monitoring, management and decision making. Applied research projects include land surface phenology in response to climate and environmental factors, natural and agricultural land use/cover change and snow/water resources, wildlife habitat characterization, and web-based geospatial applications such as http:droughtview.arizona.edu/