Randolph H. Wynne awarded Honorable Garland Gray Professorship in Forestry

Randolph H. Wynne, professor of forest remote sensing in the College of Natural Resources and Environment at Virginia Tech, has been awarded the Honorable Garland Gray Professorship in Forestry by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.

The Honorable Garland Gray Professorship in Forestry was established in 1985 by the late Virginia Sen. Elmon T. Gray and named in memory of his father, Garland Gray, who also served in the Virginia Senate. The professorship enables the college to support an outstanding faculty member in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation with recognized strengths in teaching and mentoring students and who engages in research and outreach activities in applied forestry that reflect the same standard of excellence.

A member of the Virginia Tech community since 1996, Wynne has defined and advanced the field of remote sensing for forestry and natural resource management. His scholarship underpins how agencies and industry monitor forests, carbon, and land use at scale.

He has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, which have been cited more than 23,000 times, and has an h-index of 46. He co-authored the discipline’s leading textbook “Introduction to Remote Sensing” and has held key editorial roles including co-founding editor and editor-in-chief of Science of Remote Sensing and associate editor of Remote Sensing of Environment.

Wynne has secured competitive funding from NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the U.S. Forest Service, and other major sponsors, with more than $16 million awarded as principal investigator or co-principal investigator. These resources have supported graduate student training, research innovation, and cross-unit collaborations integral to the college’s international visibility.

His research portfolio encompasses both methodological advances, such as lidar-enabled forest inventory and machine learning for multisensor time series, and applied outcomes that inform forest management and policy.

He has served on the NASA Landsat Science Team from 2006-17 and the Land Cover and Land Use Change Science Team from 2017-present, helping to shape the nation’s Earth observation strategy. His contributions have been recognized through prestigious honors, including the USGS William T. Pecora Group Award for the Landsat 8 Team, the Society of American Foresters Award in Forest Science in 2017, and the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Estes Memorial Teaching Award in 2023.

He co-organized SilviLaser in 2005 and 2017, a premier international forum that connects forest science with geospatial technology stakeholders.

He co-founded and co-directed the Center for Environmental Analytics and Remote Sensing, founded and directs the Remote Sensing Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Program, and was instrumental in launching the environmental data science major and its foundational courses.

He has also chaired the University Commission on Research, served on the Commission on Faculty Affairs, and represented the college in the Faculty Senate.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and his master’s and doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.