Welcome to my website

I received my PhD and MSc degrees in Geomatic Engineering from Yildiz Technical University and my BSc in Geodesy and Photogrammetry Engineering from Karadeniz Technical University, Türkiye. I was a visiting researcher in the Geo-Spatial Analytics Lab at the University of South Florida, US and in the Department of Earth Observation, Institute of Geography at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, Germany.

Currently, I am an assistant professor at Samsun University in Türkiye. Prior to this position, I worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Geomatic Engineering at Artvin Coruh University from 2021 to 2025 and as a research assistant in the Department of Geomatic Engineering at Yildiz Technical University, Türkiye.

As an editorial task, I have been serving as an associate editor for the European Journal of Remote Sensing and Geoplanning: Journal of Geomatics and Planning, and as one of the co-editors for the Turkish Journal of Remote Sensing. Also, I was one of the guest editors of the special issue entitled "Advances in Remote Sensing for Monitoring and Characterising Vegetation Responses to Changing and Extreme Climatic Conditions" in MDPI Remote Sensing. My main research interests include Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) Remote Sensing, Applied Machine Learning and particularly Hyperspectral Data Analysis. Recently, I am working on dimensionality reduction and classification of hyperspectral images.

I'm the member of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society and International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. I received the award for Top Reviewers for Geosciences - September 2018 from Publons. I worked (voluntarily) for the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society as the Conference & Symposia Liaison (2023-2025) and Social Media Lead (2019-2023) .

Some of my papers:

Ustuner, M., Sanli, F. B., & Dixon, B. (2015). Application of Support Vector Machines for Landuse Classification Using High-Resolution RapidEye Images: A Sensitivity Analysis. European Journal of Remote Sensing, 48(1), 403–422. https://doi.org/10.5721/EuJRS20154823

Ustuner, M., & Balik Sanli, F. (2019). Polarimetric Target Decompositions and Light Gradient Boosting Machine for Crop Classification: A Comparative Evaluation. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 8(2), 97. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi8020097

Ustuner, M. (2024). Randomized Principal Component Analysis for Hyperspectral Image Classification, 2024 IEEE Mediterranean and Middle-East Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium. https://doi.org/10.1109/M2GARSS57310.2024.10537329

Ustuner, M., & Simsek, F. F. (2025). An assessment of training data for agricultural land cover classification: a case study of Bafra, Türkiye. Earth Science Informatics, 18(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-024-01555-5