About Me
Hi, I'm Hannah. I'm a recent PhD from the University of Washington, where I study ecosystem structure using lidar and remote sensing. Most of my work is in the Sierra Nevada, looking at how vegetation comes back after high-severity fire and how fuel structure shapes what happens to homes in the wildland-urban interface.
I came to remote sensing through fire ecology, with a background in prairie ecosystem ecology and prescribed fire research across Florida pine flatwoods. That history manifests in my perspective of fire as part of systems, not a disruption to them.
When I'm not working I'm usually cooking, foraging for mushrooms in the Cascades, or training for ultramarathons.
Projects
Yosemite Regeneration Detection
Detecting post-fire conifer, oak, and shrub regeneration in Yosemite National Park using airborne lidar and multispectral imagery. Combines structural metrics with spectral indices in ordinal logistic regression models to classify regeneration across high-severity fire patches.
Understory Vegetation Segmentation with ALS
A method for isolating subcanopy point clouds from airborne lidar to characterize understory vegetation structure. Validated against terrestrial lidar across sites in Oregon, Georgia, and California, enabling landscape-scale understory mapping where field measurements are impractical.
Lidar for Defensible Space Fuel Mapping
Mapping fuel structure across defensible space zones in the wildland-urban interface using airborne lidar. Spatial GAM models link lidar-derived fuel metrics to housing loss patterns during the 2020 Creek Fire, identifying ladder fuels as a key predictor of structure survival.
Skills
Contact
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