Contact: kyle.kovach [at] wisc [dot] edu

Kyle Kovach is a postdoctoral researcher in the Townsend Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on using remote sensing techniques for ecosystem analysis at a variety of scales. He is interested in using high spatial and temporal resolution hyperspectral imagery and lidar data for the estimation of physiological, morphological, and biochemical plant properties, as well as physiognomy and taxonomy. He has experience engineering and operating UAV sensors and platforms, as well as microsystem loggers for in-situ data collection. He has worked in both experimental and natural sites in Europe and the USA collecting data for the prediction of functional traits using spectroscopy and lidar across Temperate, Boreal, and Arctic ecosystems. His PhD focused on collecting and utilizing drone hyperspectral remote sensing for estimating chemical and physiological traits in forest systems as a mechanism to understand how tree species diversity affects ecosystem function in temperate biodiversity ecosystem function sites. In his masters he utilized the US Forest Services FIA database to estimate harvest probabilities in northeastern US temperate forests. He holds a B.S., B.A., and M.S. from The Pennsylvania State University, and a PhD from The University of Freiburg in Germany where he studied under Michael Scherer-Lorenzen.

Hometown
State College, PA