Leading Chinese remote-sensing scientist Zhang Jinshui dies at 47
Beijing Normal University professor led major R&D programmes and was instrumental in boosting China's food security with satellite tech Zhang Jinshui, a pioneering scientist in remote sensing who led major research and development programmes in China and was instrumental in boosting the country's food security with satellite technologies, has died at the age of 47. Zhang, a professor and doctoral supervisor in the Faculty of Geographical Science (FGS) at Beijing Normal University, died in Beijing on March 9 following "unsuccessful medical treatment", according to multiple Chinese media reports.
The faculty held a memorial ceremony on March 11, but his obituary is no longer accessible on its website. Staff told state-affiliated Jimu News that the obituary was removed from the website after the ceremony. Several of his students have suggested that Zhang's death may have been caused by a combination of illness and an accident.
A former student posted on social media last Saturday that Zhang had in recent years developed a degenerative neurological disease and had died after a fall.
"He had been suffering from a condition similar to ALS," the student posted, referring to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or motor neurone disease, a progressive neurodegenerative condition that causes muscle weakness and paralysis. "He fell in the stairwell of an old housing estate and sustained a brain haemorrhage." The South China Morning Post has reached out to the institute for comment.
Zhang devoted his career to teaching and researching remote-sensing science and its agricultural applications. His primary research interests encompassed remote-sensing big data and
. His team's innovations developed survey technologies for crop area statistics, integrating satellite, aerial and ground-based observations. These outcomes supported China's third national agricultural census, which began on January 1, 2017, and contributed to modernising the country's agricultural survey techniques, according to his obituary as circulated online.
Zhang also led projects funded by the
, as well as major national and provincial-level projects relating to high-resolution Earth observation. Between 2017 and 2020, he headed an R&D programme focused on remote-sensing monitoring of crop distributions across China's three main grain-producing hubs: the mid-to-lower Yangtze River plain, the northeast China plain and the north China plain.
Born in 1978 in the northern province of Hebei, Zhang earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from the College of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Lanzhou University in the northwest.
In 2004, he entered Beijing Normal University's school of natural resources, which is part of the FGS, to pursue a doctorate under a renowned Chinese scholar in remote sensing. He was made a member of faculty after completing his doctoral thesis in 2007.
In 2019, he was promoted to professor. Zhang also conducted research in the United States, as a visiting scholar at Michigan State University from 2015 to 2016. He published more than 110 academic papers, and his work appeared in top domestic and international journals such as Remote Sensing of Environment. One of Zhang's studies on estimating winter wheat planting areas proposed a novel research methodology and had an international impact. His numerous career honours included a Beijing Science and Technology Progress Award and the top prize from the Chinese Society for Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography. He also held several patents.
"A leading figure in the field of statistical remote sensing - what a pity," another of Zhang's students wrote on social media about his passing, adding that Zhang had worked extremely hard, produced substantial research results and was "an absolute expert" in his field. Another student who attended Zhang's postgraduate courses described him as "a good teacher and leading scholar" who was noble and approachable, and committed to upholding "high academic standards". This student, who declined to be named, added that Zhang was "witty and humorous, and guided students with great care and thoroughness". Yet another former student, now pursuing a PhD in Sweden in vegetation ecological remote sensing, wrote on social media that Zhang "was a good teacher and very kind to his students", adding that she was "truly heartbroken" over his death.
