Michael J. Hill received his Ph. D. degree from The University of Sydney, Australia in 1985. He spent 12 years in CSIRO Division of Animal Production and then 6 years in the Bureau of Rural Sciences in the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry of the Australian Government where he carried out research in and contributed to the management of the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Accounting. In 2006, he became Professor of Earth System Science in the Department of Earth Systems Science and Policy at the University of North Dakota. He has a background in grassland agronomy, but has been working with spatial information and remote sensing of land systems for the past 17 years. He has published widely on agronomy, ecology, biogeography and production of grasslands, and radar, multispectral and hyperspectral remote sensing of grasslands, and more recently has been involved in development of scenario analysis models for assessment of carbon dynamics in Australian rangeland and savanna systems. His current interests are in use of MODIS land product data in model-data assimilation, application of quantitative information from hyperspectral and multi-angle imaging to vegetation description, multi-criteria and decision frameworks for coupled human-environment systems, and methods and approaches to application of spatial data for land use management.