Van Kane is Research Professor at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington’s College of the Environment. He studies patterns of forest structure using remote sensing, especially airborne LiDAR. His work focuses on applied studies such as measuring forest fuels, studying large areas of forests to elucidate forest processes and resulting patterns and developing new methods to relate LiDAR data to field and satellite forests measurements. His current work involves studying forest structure across a range of forest types including the Pacific Northwest and California at scales ranging from 25 to 95,000 hectares.