I am a recent Tufts University graduate with a passion for birds, conservation, and GIS. I hope to improve biodiversity, habitat management, and climate change resilience through spatial analysis.

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When I started community college, I wanted to be an artist for Wizards of the Coast (the company that owns Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: the Gathering). That changed after two experiences: taking intro to organic and biochemistry and doing volunteer data recording at a bird banding station. I was already a "nature" person, but I had struggled with academics during high school so I was convinced that science was not for me up until that point. My chemistry professor taught our class in an engaging way and was very encouraging, and bird banding opened my eyes to the sort of work that was out there.

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During my time at Iowa State University, I was constantly involved with bird conservation research efforts. The job that really lit the flame, though, was working as a field and research technician for the Landscape Ecology and Sustainable Ecosystem Management Lab (LESEM), led by Dr. Lisa Schulte Moore. The lab's crowning achievement was pioneering "prairie strips," a specific land conservation structure implemented by the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in the U.S. Farmers and private landowners could take arable land out of crop production and plant native prairie plants, reducing soil loss and nutrient pollution. A secondary purpose of these strips was that they provide habitat for wildlife. It was our job - a crew of field technicians led by then-PhD student Matthew Stephenson - to investigate how grassland bird nest survival along with reptile, small mammal, and mesomammal (e.g., deer, coyote) presence were impacted by these novel agricultural landscape features. We did just about everything, from searching for nests, conducting vegetation surveys, and wrangling snakes, to doing land use digitization and animal identification in audio recordings and photographs taken on private farms.

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Working for the LESEM Lab taught me many things, including:

• The importance of interdisciplinary research and informed policy

• How to go about identifying unfamiliar organisms

• On-the-fly problem-solving both in the computer lab and in uncomfortable conditions outside

• Dealing with remote work and motivation while writing a manuscript (now published!)

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The part where I did land use digitization ignited something in me, and I did little projects in QGIS and R during the first COVID-19 lockdown to keep the fire going. One such project was the animation (to the right) of the ISU campus buildings appearing the year they were built. I knew that I wanted to learn more about how to use GIS tools.

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And that I did! During my first semester at Tufts University, I worked with Dr. J. Michael Reed on a project modeling the distribution of an extremely rare species of firefly, Photuris flavicollis. I'll spare you the details since it was not the most fruitful of projects, but it did lead me to start coursework in GIS at the university.

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At this point, I've taken several courses in GIS and remote sensing, and successfully graduated with my M.Sc. in global change biology. I've had the pleasure of working with all sorts of data - those downloaded from the US Census Bureau site, imagery data obtained by the Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellites, and crowd-sourced "citizen science" data submitted to eBird and iNaturalist, to name a few. All the projects I worked on during my final semesters at Tufts taught me a great deal of successfully handling and analyzing geospatial data.

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Since graduation, I've been volunteering with a local organization that is focused on providing environmental education to local children. I've facilitated their projects by providing mapping resources of project sites and expertise on wildlife needs.