KC Cushman

KC joined ORNL in 2023 as a Liane B. Russell Fellow in the Ecosystem Processes Group and Environmental Sciences Division. KC is a forest ecologist broadly interested in understanding variation in forest structure and function across space and time. Her research is motivated by the importance of forests for understanding and predicting global cycles of carbon, water, and nutrients. KC’s research combines remote sensing measurements (terrestrial, airborne, and spaceborne lidar; photogrammetry; imaging spectroscopy; synthetic aperture radar) and field-based observations (forest plots) to understand how organismal mechanisms affect landscape-scale processes. 

In her Distinguished Staff Fellowship project, KC uses lidar and radar remote sensing tools to study how tree biodiversity influences disturbance recovery in Southeastern US forests. KC is also a member of the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments–Tropics Project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER).