Most of my package development work relates to natural history museum collections, and germplasm repository work - especially seed banking. Essentially, I am always interested in decreasing the human workloads, while increasing the scientific merit of collections. All of this work relates heavily around spatial data science workflows. If I'm not doing that, then I'm probably making a package for, or with, a friend!
BarnebyLives & Repo Tools for collecting digital data for herbarium specimens.
safeHavens & Repo Tools to help germplasm curators prioritize areas for new accessions.
eSTZwritR & Repo For sharing empirical Seed Transfer Zones (STZs) spatial data products.
AugspurgerIndex Calculate Augspurgers Index of Synchrony
getGridmet download gridmet data to a computer near you
Data Visualization Gallery & Repo Blah! Thrown together over the weekend of Jan 20 2025! A work in progress - check back often ;-)!
The Bureau of Land Management provides stewardship for the most public lands in the United States of any agency, roughly 1 in 8 acres of the US are managed by them. In the early 2010's they launched an initiative across all of this land to assess the current ecological integrity, and inventory the plant life - which provides a baseline for future monitoring efforts. Although several field offices have finished their first five-year sample design, few have written reports on their findings, and none as comphrehensively as we did at the UFO ;-) (Uncompahgre Field Office). This 93 page report details our findings in the context of the multiple use mandate, a management paradigm under which all public land uses must be catered to.
Assessment of Current Upland Vegetation Conditions in the Uncompahgre Field Office, Gunnison Gorge, and Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Areas & Umbrella Repo!
I turn down a lot of talk invitations, but sometimes a very important person tells me I have to do one! And that's what we have three examples of here.
Modelling Natural History to Increase Native Seed Collection Efficiency; Space, Time, and Connectivity
A Spatial Data Specialist for SOS? - Job Pitch
Estimating the size of the US Native Seed Market - Pitch
My Masters Defense
I love teaching! As a graduate student I had the privilege of being a teaching assistant for Northwestern University's "R for Data Science" course for two quarters. This course was based on Hadley's excellent book of the same name and was hosted by the Programs in Earth and Planetary Science, Environmental Science, and Plant Biology & Conservation. In my second year I taught a full week of the course focused on Spatial Data Science ;-)! I was also invited to do a guest lecture for the Plant Biolgy & Conservations course "Anaytical Toolbox for Ecologists and Evolutionary Biologists" on SDS as well. Both of these courses were graduate/upper division level courses.
- Day I
- Day II
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) take home lab activity
Species Distribution Models; an Introduction & repo
My professional teaching style can be described as a "firehose of flowers", i.e. a ton of exposure to complex information required to make quick decisions with. It is targeted for recent B.S., M.S. and Ph.D graduates, essentially people with a good head on their shoulders, but who have likely not been exposed to much pragmatic decision making and troubleshooting. Essentially I try to provide them with a framework for categorizing their observations, and hopefully get them excited enough about the topics they take on the responsibility to further educate themselves on the topics.
A very quick introduction to vegetation assessments & repo
Geology, Geomorphology, and Soils, for early career botanists & repo
What's a Model and How do we Plan Hitches? & repo
What is Graduate School and how do you apply?
This is a click along/set up tutorial for previous fieldworker crews I've had. It gives them some basic backgrounds on what a geographic information system (GIS) is, and helps them set up their work projects. It was my first time going to online, non-lecture based instruction. I wouldn't set up something like this again, but what I would do was largely informed by this experience.
Using QGIS
The first repo is a bit of a mess, well the write up is.
I've been hoping to formulate that for submission to a journal, but it's hard to reach that far back on the stove.
Second repo was me learning to code, blah!, but the actual work is fantastic.
Third repo is straight fire, ignore the readme and jump to the functions.
Using SDMs to find plant populations for native seed collection
Using SDMs to improve metagenomics results
Eriogonum coloradense
I have a weird sense of pride in this EDA, the ground truth was just so simple, and this was done so quick in general. I've been trying to pawn it off on an undergrad but they never bite, I guess this is a last ditch effort? Identifying Leaves from Nest Cells