Lindsay Land is a second-year undergraduate student studying Computational & Systems Biology at UCLA. She is currently part of the Forest Ecosystems and Global Change lab led by Dr. Elsa Ordway of UCLA’s Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department. While the lab supports various projects, the common thread of research is the use of remote-sensing data, field observations, and models to explain changes in forest ecosystems due to climate change to better inform sustainable land-use policies worldwide. Specifically, Lindsay works on the NASA-funded Land-Cover and Land-Use Change project (LCLUC) with her mentor, PhD student Hannah Stouter, to study forest gain patterns in the Congo Basin, in tandem with qualitative information about the livelihoods of people in the region. She uses airborne and spaceborne remote sensing data to analyse forest gain, and regional surveys with Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), village chiefs, and village inhabitants to identify the socioeconomic drivers of forest gain patterns. Currently, she is conducting an accuracy assessment of the datasets used by validating points labelled as gain using Google Earth Pro. In the future, she hopes to create a random forest model in R that will predict future forest change over the entire region of interest. Lindsay would like to thank Dr. Ordway and Hannah for their continual guidance and support of her individual interests, and for making her feel completely included in the project. She would also like to thank the CARE Fellows Programme for supporting her in her first research experience. She is incredibly grateful to have joined a lab so well aligned with her research interests and personal beliefs.