Works at the intersection of fields that do not normally touch.
Alex Roessner is co-founder of Landseed PBC, where he is building measurement infrastructure for ecological markets alongside Greg Curtis, Patagonia's former Deputy General Counsel. Landseed deploys continuous sensor networks on conserved land and issues Earth Credits — instruments that measure ecological condition across six dimensions, anchored to county-recorded legal deeds, designed to replace the estimation architecture of the voluntary carbon market.
He arrived at this work from the field. Roessner has tracked Sumatran tigers in the Leuser Ecosystem, documented grassroots lemur conservation in Madagascar, surveyed unmapped terrain in Ecuador's Chocó, followed wild pumas through Patagonia, and photographed sperm whales in Dominica. Out of that fieldwork came a computer vision system for re-identifying individual humpback whales from underwater photographs of their full bodies — trained against the Moorea population in French Polynesia. A co-authored paper on cetacean re-identification is expected in 2026.
He also arrived from markets. As Managing Partner of Mythos Liquid Capital, a systematic digital asset hedge fund, he developed the quantitative orientation that shapes how he thinks about ecological market design. He founded the Roessner Restoration Initiative, a 501(c)(3) operating across four continents, and serves as Vice President of the Savia Foundation.
Roessner graduated from Northwestern University in three years with a double B.A. in Economics and Environmental Policy while competing as a Division I baseball player, and was named one of Northwestern's Trienens Institute “Grads to Watch” for the Class of 2025. He is proficient in Mandarin and based in New York.
WritingIII
The Unauditable Market
2026
On what the carbon market is actually trading, why it is never going to work, and what the measurement of living systems requires to be real.
The argument runs from Goldsmiths’ Hall in London — where assayers have verified metal purity for over seven centuries — to a single principle: markets in valuable things do not work unless an independent party, with no stake in the outcome, performs the measurement. That principle is what the voluntary carbon market does not have, and what an Ecological Condition Index can.
Read the full essay →
single author · published · Spring 2025
Conservation in the most biodiverse, most remote regions of the planet is repeatedly defeated by a structural problem: the people governing the land are not the people whose data describes the land. Top-down conservation mandates flatten the cultural sovereignty that made those landscapes worth protecting in the first place.
The paper argues for a different stack — one in which digital governance serves as a substrate for indigenous data sovereignty rather than overriding it. It examines DAO-based coordination as a primitive for managing sustainable harvesting, marine protected areas, and resource allocation tied to spawning patterns and fisheries co-management; and it walks through how community-driven technical integrations transfer across distinct ecological and cultural landscapes without flattening any of them.
Written from the field. Draws on direct work in Sumatra, Madagascar, the Chocó, Patagonia, and Dominica.
Read the full paper →
co-authored · forthcoming
A computer vision pipeline for identifying individual humpback whales from underwater photographs of their full bodies. Each whale lives potentially seventy years; manual matching takes roughly twenty minutes per image. The corpus is the Moorea population in French Polynesia — the same individuals returning along their July–November migration, observed for decades.
An embedding model + similarity search reduces re-identification to a constant-time lookup against the population. The first cross-population match landed at 91% confidence. The model is not the contribution; the contribution is conservation infrastructure for longitudinal study at population scale.
› Shorter notes — /lab · quotable