Adriana Uscanga

I’ve been slow to share news here and a lot has happened this past year, but the big one is that I joined the Department of Forest Resources at the University of Minnesota as assistant professor this Fall 2024. I’m really excited for this new stage in my career. There are many exciting projects coming in the next few months and a new website is under construction so stay tuned!

After meeting over zoom for months, we finally met in person for the intensive week of the Spectral Ecology Summer School 2023 at the beautiful Mountain Lake Biological Station. Our time there was split into lab sessions, hands-on coding activities, final project time, inclusive leadership activities, and when rain permitted, some field sessions. We also spent a good amount of time getting to know each other while we worked on our craft projects and hiking.

I’ve been using Landsat time series analysis in the last years to understand how recent disturbance shapes current spatial patterns of forest structure and composition. So I published a mini-review on the use of time series analysis for tracking vegetation change for Tools of the trade at Nature Reviews Earth and Environment. You can read it here.

I’m colaborating with a group from the University of Michigan on a project about coffee farms diversity, aboveground biomass, food justice, and resiliency to climate change. This month we went on a fieldtrip to the central mountains of Puerto Rico to measure some trees and talk to coffee producers. We had a wonderful time! Here are some pictures of the trip.

About me I am a landscape ecologist currently working as a Research Associate (Postdoc) at the Ecological Remote Sensing and Modeling Lab at Michigan State University. I earned my Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Oregon in 2022. My research focuses on understanding how ecosystems and historically marginalized human populations are affected by and respond to global change. I’m particularly interested in understanding the role of land use and management in shaping forest and agricultural landscapes, as well as the interactions between land-use/land-cover change and climate change.