Melakeneh G. Gedefaw is a postdoctoral researcher (Remote Sensing data analyst role) in the Department of Animal and Range Sciences at New Mexico State University (NMSU). He earned his Ph.D. from NMSU and has an interest in the application of Remote sensing and big data to landscape ecological modeling. His research areas encompass dryland degradation, drought monitoring, and, landscape ecology, and land use/land cover change analysis. His current work focuses on studying the vulnerability of dryland ecosystems to ecological drought using novel data science techniques.