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Dr. Alexander Shenkin

Dr. Alexander Shenkin (Dr. Allie for short) is an assistant research professor here at NAU.

Here is a link to his website and an excerpt from his about page:

He is an assistant research professor at Northern Arizona University with interest and experience merging social, anthropological, and political perspectives of ecosystems and conservation. he employs novel field techniques coupled with modern statistical methods to address long-standing questions about nature at a range of scales; his experience in electrical and software engineering enables him to push the frontier where technology meets ecology. His research focuses on two principal themes: (1) ecosystem responses to management, disturbance, and climate change, and (2) the roles of an ecosystem’s structure in its function, assembly, and response to disturbance and stress. He focuses on forest ecosystems in the tropics but his interests are global. He is currently conducting research relating the scaling of tree and forest canopy traits to ecosystem structure and carbon cycling.

His doctoral work, in the Putz lab at the University of Florida, investigated the role of important contemporary environmental change (logging, drought, and fire) in tropical forest dynamics, and their implications for future forests. His current work on traits, structure, and function focuses on testing the metabolic scaling of tree structure, using airborne hyperspectral imaging spectroscopy to scale forest carbon cycles from trees to landscapes, and investigating the role of vertical light profiles on forest function with a novel vertical light profile sensor. Further initiatives include 3D modeling of forest and function to better predict response to a changing climate, using remote sensing to identify spectral signatures of individual tree crowns, advancing our understanding of the role of tree respiration in the carbon cycle using high-resolution LiDAR, and investigating the evolution of tropical tree crown shapes.