He leads the TerraLumaresearch group, focusing on the development and application of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), sensor integration, and image processing techniques for environmental, agricultural, and high-precision aerial mapping applications. Arko teaches remote sensing and GIS at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He obtained his PhD degree in 2004 from the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) and Utrecht University in The Netherlands. His current focus is on quantitative remote sensing of vegetation with the use of sophisticated UAS sensors to better understand the structure, distribution, and functioning of vegetation, and to bridge the observational scale gap between field samples and satellite observations.