Meet the PI
Dr. Jody Vogeler, Lab Director
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Dr. Jody Vogeler is a Research Scientist with the Natural Resources Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. Dr. Vogeler's research is driven by the goal of gaining a better understanding of changing patterns within forest and woodland ecosystems due to natural disturbance regimes, management activities, and urbanization to inform sustainable management. With a strong background in field-based research, Dr. Vogeler has built her career integrating remote sensing data sets with field surveys to advance ecosystem science by characterizing, analyzing, and forecasting ecosystem dynamics over space and time. She strives to keep her lab at the forefront of remote sensing technology, geospatial methodologies, and quantitative approaches, leveraging cloud computing resources and machine learning for projects across local to national extents. Dr. Vogeler is passionate about providing opportunities for early career as well as experienced researchers within her research lab to improve their applied remote sensing skills on her various grant-funded research projects and gain experience working on collaborative interdisciplinary research teams.
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Current Lab Members
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Patrick Fekety, Research AssociatePatrick works remotely from western Oregon. His research interests include using remote sensing to aid natural resource management. Patrick’s work is currently focused on mapping forest biomass and identifying & characterizing forest disturbances. He is a team member on a NASA Carbon Monitoring Systems project, which uses coincident field measurements, lidar, and Landsat time series data to predict aboveground forest attributes (e.g., basal area, biomass, volume) across the western US. Additionally, he has been investigating the spectral characteristics of forest disturbances across the Great Lakes region of the US. His expertise includes lidar processing and imputation-based modeling of forest attributes. Patrick received his Masters of Forestry from Oregon State University. He has worked as a forestry technician with USFS and BLM and as a researcher with Michigan Technological University and University of Minnesota.
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Steven Filippelli, Research Associate & PhD StudentSteve measures trees from space! His research has involved combining lidar, high-resolution aerial imagery, satellite image time series, and other remotely sensed data to track changes in forest structure. Steve’s recent work has primarily focused on quantifying woody encroachment and disturbance in the western United States and examining the implications of those dynamics for wildlife and carbon storage. This has involved applying a multitude of image processing and machine learning techniques to remotely sensed imagery, such as object-oriented analysis of aerial photos and Random Forest modeling with Landsat series. Steve obtained his master’s degree in Ecology from CSU where his thesis involved measuring the effects of wildfire on forest structure and biomass by fusing point clouds derived from aerial imagery and lidar. He is now working on a PhD in Ecology with a dissertation on remote sensing of vegetation and land cover change in the Greater Kruger area of South Africa. When Steve isn’t staring at trees on a computer screen he likes to visit them in real life by hiking and climbing in the Rocky Mountains.
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Peder Engelstad, Research Associate & PhD StudentPeder is a spatial ecologist with skills in R and python programming, high-performance computing, and machine learning. The bulk of his current work is alongside researchers at USGS FORT, where they build, optimize, and distribute species distribution models of invasive plant species under current and future climate scenarios. This longstanding collaboration has recently given Peder the opportunity to pursue a PhD program at CSU. In January 2023, he will start this journey with his nerd flag waving proudly. When not optimizing code, you will likely find Peder baking bread, canoeing, climbing, dungeon mastering, trying to remember German words, playing tennis, drinking an IPA, or starting a tinkering project that he will never finish.
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Jessie Eastburn, Research AssociateJessie earned her master’s degree in Geography from the University of Utah in 2023, where she conducted extensive research on the integration of field data, lidar data, and machine learning techniques for biomass modeling in piñon-juniper woodlands. In the lab, her main research focus is on developing spatial tools to inform natural resource management practices across western US forest systems by using high-density lidar and machine learning to model forest measurements. Jessie is passionate about using her skills in earth science, programming, and remotely sensed data processing and analysis to address research questions related to forest ecology, sustainable resource management, and natural hazards. Through her research, she aspires to contribute to a safer and more sustainable future for both human and natural systems. She also has a really cool rock collection.
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Daniel Rode, Research AssociateDaniel joined the Vogeler Lab in summer of 2023, soon after earning a Bachelor’s of Science in Ecosystem Science and Sustainability from Colorado State University. He is an open-source enthusiast who loves using software developed by passionate coders and researchers to process geospatial data. He started out in the IT services world but has always had a fascination with data and sustainability. His position in the lab allows him to use his technology skills and interests to further ecological research. Developing command-line pipelines for LiDAR and satellite imagery processing is his area of expertise. He is contributing to several lab projects related to forest and woodland ecosystems, including monitoring redcedar expansions in Kansas and characterizing forest structure to inform sustainable forest management planning across western US forests. Daniel uses Linux as his main operating system and believes that the best workflows should be versatile, scalable, programmatically reproducible, and accessible to everyone. In his spare time, Daniel enjoys spending time with friends hiking, playing board games, and cooking.
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Past Lab Members
Orion Cardenas-Ritzert, Research Associate 2024-2025; MS Student - Graduated Fall 2023
Thesis Title: Building on sustainable development goal indicator 11.3.1 for improved utility and guidance.
Shahriar Shah Heydari, Postdoc 2021 - 2024
Matthew Shawcroft, Research Associate 2022-2024
Ashley Martinovich, Lab Technician 2022-2023
Hannah Liebman, Lab Technician 2022-2023
Sarah Sathe, Lab Technician 2022-2023
Morgan Guttman, Lab Technician 2022
Neal Swayze, Research Associate 2021-2022
Cody Bingham, Lab Technician 2021
Keana Shadwell, Lab Technician 2021
Eric Jensen, MS Student – Graduated Fall 2020
Thesis Title: Leveraging the Landsat archive to characterize plant species diversity and post-fire recovery in Great Basin shrublands.
Jillian LaRoe, MS Student – Graduated Summer 2020
Thesis Title: Characterizing distributions and drivers of emergent aquatic vegetation in Minnesota.
Thesis Title: Building on sustainable development goal indicator 11.3.1 for improved utility and guidance.
Shahriar Shah Heydari, Postdoc 2021 - 2024
Matthew Shawcroft, Research Associate 2022-2024
Ashley Martinovich, Lab Technician 2022-2023
Hannah Liebman, Lab Technician 2022-2023
Sarah Sathe, Lab Technician 2022-2023
Morgan Guttman, Lab Technician 2022
Neal Swayze, Research Associate 2021-2022
Cody Bingham, Lab Technician 2021
Keana Shadwell, Lab Technician 2021
Eric Jensen, MS Student – Graduated Fall 2020
Thesis Title: Leveraging the Landsat archive to characterize plant species diversity and post-fire recovery in Great Basin shrublands.
Jillian LaRoe, MS Student – Graduated Summer 2020
Thesis Title: Characterizing distributions and drivers of emergent aquatic vegetation in Minnesota.
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