Dr. Ekena Rangel Pinage

Ekena is a geospatial data scientist and forest ecologist. Her work focuses on understanding the ecological impacts of natural and anthropogenic disturbances on tropical forests.  She has a bachelor’s degree in Geography and a master’s degree in Forest Sciences from the University of Brasilia. In her doctoral dissertation at the University of Technology Sydney, with a visiting period at OSU, she investigated the effects of forest degradation (selective logging and fires) in structure and function of the Amazon Forest using optical, thermal, and lidar remote sensing. She worked for several institutions in Brazil, such as the Brazilian Forest Service, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation and WWF-Brasil. She joined OSU in 2021 under a cooperation with the US Forest Service to work on the NASA-funded project ‘Quantifying agricultural expansion and tropical forest degradation in the Brazilian Arc of Deforestation: A multi-sensor, multi-scale approach’. She currently works for the Wildlife Conservation Society as an Ecological Integrity Research Specialist.