Dr. Liu’s research interests focus on characterizing effects of climate change and human activities on water resources and terrestrial ecosystems with the goal of improving our understanding of regional earth system and our ability to forecast its variability. His current research interest focus on green house gas emission from terrestrial ecosystems, historical land-use/land-cover change detection by using remotely sensed data, interactions between hydrological and biogeochemical cycles, regional earth system modeling, and land-ocean interactions. The common theme of his research is the development and application of process-based computer model for integrating in situ and remote sensing data to solve scientific and policy-related questions on large-scale regional and global environmental issues.