Portfolio Overview
Ecological modeling, GIS, cartography, and web design are all complex and graphic mediums which don't reduce down to a couple bulleted points on a resume very well. I created this portfolio to describe some of the projects I have worked on over the past 5 years.
Most of my recent work has been on several large 1-2 year projects, including the CorridorDesigner project on which I am currently working, the Arizona Missing Linkages project I worked on from 2005-2006, and the 2 years I spent intensively modeling bird distributions for my Master's research at Purdue University. I have also included additional short-term GIS and web design projects I've worked on recently.
If you have any questions about these projects, please don't hesitate to drop me a line.
Work philosophies
Conceptual problems are often much more difficult than technological problems. Given a clearly-defined goal, it is easy enough to learn and adapt software to help achieve that goal (Doing is easy...it's the thinking that makes my brain hurt!). While I do a lot of technological in-the-trenches work, I always start with the big picture questions for every project, such as:
- what question are we trying to answer?
- why should people care about this project?
- what is the story we are trying to tell?
- how can we best communicate the results?
Once the big picture is in place, I concentrate on 1) determining the appropriate tools for the job, 2) organizing workflows to optimize efficiency, and 3) finding the best method for managing data and deliverables. With a solid foundation in place, it is much easier to focus on the analysis at hand. I continuously go back to the big picture throughout a project, and find that doing so adds clarity and focus to even the smallest details. While this seems like common sense, nearly every day I see a map with superfluous layers which impede the narrative a map should be telling or read reports with non-informative words, analyses, and graphics. Edward Tufte says, “Above all else show the data.” Strunk and White say, “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” I say, make every element of a map, every line on a graph, and every word of a report tell a story I should care about!
While I perform quite a lot of modeling, I think the greatest value of models is that they force us to think about the problem at hand in greater detail, and acknowledge uncertainty & assumptions which may otherwise be left unsaid. Models aren't the Truth, won't give us all the answers, and if applied inappropriately, can leave us worse-off than where we started. For these reasons, I am cautious with modeling, and use it to aid my thinking, not replace it.
GIS, Science, and Conservation
It may come as a surprise to many that know me that I still consider myself a conservation biologist or ecologist first, and a GIS guy second. I was trained as an ecologist and environmental scientist, and I love thinking like one. While I enjoy working on purely technical projects (e.g. programming), I could never solely work on technical projects in absence of the big picture. On the whole, I want the technical tools I use to benefit the environment and humanity, and I believe it is possible to work towards the betterment of both simultaneously.
Technical Communication & Web Design
Whether I am writing reports, creating graphics, making maps, or designing web pages, I aim to communicate ideas as clearly as possible. While I will always be a life long student who works to improve my technical communication skills (and a human who is bound to mess up sometimes), I take the messages of visionaries such as Strunk and White and Edward Tufte seriously, and work to incorporate their ideas into the way I communicate.
When designing web pages, I am committed to applying Web Standards. What are web standards and why do they matter? The simplest explanation is that web standards is a set of best practices when designing web pages, including the use of 1) semantically-coded (X)HTML to describe the data on a webpage 2) Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to visually present the data, 3) and Javascript to affect behavior of the data. What does this mean to the layperson who doesn't develop web pages? While others have covered the benefits of web-standards elsewhere, the main benefits of a standards-based approach are:
- cleanly-written code that is easier to maintain and modify
- more accessible web pages for those with disabilities, which is a good thing all around, and also required for federal webpages by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973
- smaller file sizes, resulting in less bandwidth costs for the host and faster loading times for the user
- better search engine rankings
- future-proof, ensuring future web browsers will be able to process the webpage, and future web designers will be able to reuse previously-created web content more easily
I code all web pages by hand, and find this is actually faster, easier, and more powerful than relying on programs to do the work for me.