Illustration by Monica Duwel
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2026-05-01 • Liam Otten
Class Acts: Amanda Kesler
2026-05-01 • Liam Otten
(Photo: Chris Malacarne/WashU)
In this Q&A, Kesler, who also serves as a part-time coach with the WashU women’s soccer team, discusses mapping the damage, the beauty of repair and the need to work hard for one another.
Kesler, a master of landscape architecture candidate at the WashU Sam Fox School, had been visiting family in Detroit. An hour before her plane touched down, an EF3 tornado ripped a milewide path through northern sections of St. Louis and St. Louis County.
“There was so much destruction,” Kesler remembered. “My car was totaled. My friend’s apartment was destroyed. The loss of trees was immense.”
As the city began its long recovery, Kesler — thanks to a summer internship with local firm Planning Design Studio (which volunteered its services) — began working with the municipal Forestry Division to take stock.
In this Q&A, Kesler, who also serves as a part-time coach with the WashU women’s soccer team, discusses mapping the damage, the beauty of repair and the need to work hard for one another.
Immediately after the tornado, Surdex, a local geospatial company, shared high-resolution aerial photography with the city. You have undergraduate degrees in architecture and environmental science. How did you use that data?
The city needed to know what city-owned trees, street trees specifically, had been lost. The Forestry Division has an inventory of trees they’ve planted or maintain, which documents their health and status as well as what kind of tree it is.
By overlaying the Surdex imagery with the city tree point data, I was able to zoom in and identify the scale of the storm. Yes, you get the tornado pathway from NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). But that doesn’t really tell you the extent of the damage.
Identifying where trees still looked healthy eliminated a lot of drive time. It allowed us to really focus on areas where the destruction was most widespread.
Illustration by Monica Duwel
What were your findings?
Out of 17,000 trees in the destruction area, we identified more than 1,800 that were dead. That’s just street trees — it doesn’t include, for instance, trees in parks.
I helped to do all that surveying: Getting into a car, driving the streets, documenting with a field mapper which trees had come down. We had to look at everything. Some trees might look healthy on the aerial but were structurally impaired. Those wouldn’t survive more than a few months.
Our report was basically an updated attribute table, which the city could match to its online tree data. Ultimately, that could help in reporting to FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency).
That tree data also informed your cumulative project for the MLA program’s Shade Sanctuaries Studio.
The project is called Kintsugi Park. It’s inspired by the Japanese pottery technique, which frames fracture and repair as moments for creating something beautiful. I wanted to honor repair and regrowth as a civic act.
It’s a pot-in-pot tree nursery. The site is Sherman Park in north city. The nursery is very small, only 80 trees. Half would be adoptable by local community residents. The other half would be for the city to use in street replanting efforts.
A lot of trees that came down were end-of-life pin oaks, along with ash, sycamores and little-leaf lindens. We’d see these bursts in which the same types of trees, all planted in the same year, were all affected by the storm in similar ways. My hope would be to leverage the nursery as a kind of living laboratory that could help the city update planting guidelines. How do we make a good urban forest?
You’re WashU’s nominee to the national Olmstead Scholars Program, which recognizes student leadership in landscape architecture. You also were part of WashU’s 2024 and 2025 women’s soccer teams, which won national championships. What makes a good coach?
Coaching has been a huge part of my career. I’ve really learned how to communicate with other people — which is something that I’ve folded into my design process. How do people feel when you talk to them?
I work with goalkeepers. Sometimes, as a goalkeeper, you have to make a play. You’re the last line of defense. That comes with a lot of pressure. Winning is hard!
My coaching style is to uplift their strengths and to give them the tools that they need for success. Trusting one another, working hard for one another — that’s a big part of what I get to do every day.