Ben Townsend
Ben Townsend is a graduate student in Penn State’s Department of Geography pursuing both his Master’s and PhD. He received his bachelor’s degree in Geography from Macalester College in 2020. In term of research, he interested in agroecology and plant ecology in mountain and montane ecosystems. More specifically, he is interested in the role of biodiversity (in particular, agro-biodiversity) in helping populations and communities be resilient to climate change and climate shocks, and how this varies across altitude and space. His current research at Penn State uses remote sensing to track how agricultural land use has changed across elevational gradients from 1990 to the present in the Peruvian Andes, with a focus on what environmental and climatic factors could potentially be associated with agricultural land change.