Keilana Sugano

Sentinel Landscapes Culture & Communications Associate

Keilana is a graduate of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo with a B.S. in Anthropology and Geography and a B.A. in Political Science where she concentrated in Global Politics. Working in communities has been integral to her growth as a student and a global citizen. In 2017, she was selected to be part of a team of delegates working in Riobamba, Ecuador on community action projects where she collaborated with a local school and carpenters to construct shelters. This experience led her to Cal Poly where she has worked as a teaching assistant, lab assistant, and researcher- and has continued her passion by volunteering over 200 hours in SLO County.

She was previously a Frost Research Fellow at the Urban Forest Ecosystems Institute, within the Cal Poly Biological Sciences Department where she combined her GIS expertise with hands-on fieldwork - including scaling dozens of trees at local parks to install early prototypes of ePlant’s tree-sensing technology that assessed their health and resilience. Behind a computer, she also leveraged machine-learning by training a neural network to analyze and map the distribution of urban trees across California, culminating in a research publication and an interactive Earth Engine App.

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