Wesley Rancher
Wesley is from Columbus, Ohio, and earned his BA in Geography and Environmental Studies with a minor in Philosophy from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2023. His past research experience investigated lake changes on the Greenland Ice Sheet using multiple remote sensing methods, and he spent a summer term at NASA DEVELOP, mapping invasive plant communities in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument using remote sensing and machine learning.
For his master’s thesis, Wesley is focusing on estimating tree biomass in interior Alaska, by integrating remote sensing, machine learning, and spatial modeling with LANDIS-II. He is interested in understanding how climate change and environmental conditions shape forest dynamics over time and space.