Investigating Vegetation Structure and Diversity in Texas and Oklahoma with Earth Observations to Aid Grassland Bird Conservation

2025, NASA DEVELOP

Coordinated with a team of 4 to map and model grasslands and climatic stressors across 60 million acres over 11 years in Texas and Oklahoma, supporting regional bird habitat restoration. Produced a Random Forest regression model in ArcGIS Pro to predict ground-truth vegetation measurements across the continuous landscape and led a 5-year monthly time series analysis of precipitation, temperature, and drought. Workflows included geoprocessing, data cleaning, layout/graph/package development, and automating spatiotemporally expansive imagery access.

Additionally equipped partners with end-user tools and tutorials to replicate and rescale remote-sensing methodologies. Resulting deliverables included a technical manuscript, oral presentation, and poster. Took leadership over partner organization correspondence, cartographic visualization, and database management, leading to recognition through the nation-wide program's AMA scholarship.