Welcome! I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. I’m a geospatial data scientist who dabbles in spatial and landscape ecology.

I suppose you’re here to learn a little bit more about me. In my undergraduate work, I studied the fine scale site fidelity of northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) and the home ranges of pumas (Puma concolor). These projects resulted in multiple poster presentations and an honors thesis (Home Range Trends of Adult Male Pumas in the Santa Cruz Mountains). My undergraduate faculty advisor was Dan Costa and my thesis advisor was Chris Wilmers.

For my Masters, I was advised by Bart Grudzinski. My MA thesis was on the site characteristics of beaver dams in southwest Ohio. I modeled beaver dam site characteristics using open source tools and created niche models using a logistic regression and a random forest model.

After my time at Miami University, I began working as an analyst for Maxar. I began the process of automating a lot of manual processes through Python. After speaking with my manager, I opted to pursue additional coursework in data analytics. Currently I’m pursuing my Masters in Professional Studies (MPS) in Data Analytics at Penn State.

My time at Maxar seemed to be all too short, as I began working as a data analyst with the North Metro Fire Rescue District. While its still a bit early to write about what I’ll be doing there, I suspect the majority of my work will be data analytics with tools like Power BI as well as ETL pipelines. The work I’m doing can probably be best described as full stack data analytics.

While you’re here, I invite you to read the articles I’ve written. My early articles focused on some undergraduate field work, but more recently, I’ve focused on technical posts that I hope help to clear up methods that I’ve used in my research. As my experience has grown, so has my knowledge. I’ve decided to section off my work into three broad categories: ecology, GIS, and data analytics. While the blog posts will continue to populate on the home page in chronological order, the posts are now categorized to help you.

As my website has increased in popularity (~1000 unique hits/month), I’ve seen an increase in requests, whether through comments or through the contact me form. I’ve always believed that collaboration in science is paramount to advance the field. It is especially true in ecology, where many individuals may not have had the proper training in GIS software or scripting languages (R/Python). With that being said, the amount of requests for help has now exceeded my capacity to assist. For any future requests, I will require co-authorship on any publications that may be derived. Best practice is that you acknowledge the assistance my walk-throughs may have provided you.

I am more than happy providing feedback via comments and email as I have time.

Please feel free to check out my LinkedIn and my CV.

Select images were furnished and are copyrighted by Sebastian Kennerknecht Photography. They are used by permission.