Hamid Reza Pourghasemi is a professor of watershed management engineering in the College of Agriculture, Shiraz University, in Iran. His main research interests are GIS-based spatial modelling using machine learning/data mining techniques in different fields such as landslides, floods, gully erosion, forest fires, land subsidence, species distribution modelling, and groundwater/hydrology. Professor Pourghasemi also works on multi-criteria decision-making methods in natural resources and environmental science. He has published over 230 peer-reviewed papers in high-quality journals and seven edited books for Springer and Elsevier and is an active reviewer for over 90 international journals. He was selected as one of the five young scientists under 40 by The World Academy of Science (TWAS 2019) and was a highly cited researcher in 2019 and 2020