With the Colorado Natural Heritage Program I worked on two major projects. The first being the Biodiversity Indicators Program Dashboard, which focuses on supporting national, regional, and global institutions with tools for developing streamlined biodiversity monitoring and reporting systems that track progress toward biodiversity-related targets. The program meets the increasing need for capacity development in biodiversity monitoring, reporting, and indicators among national governments, regional bodies, and UN organizations, utilizing the Colorado Natural Heritage Program’s (CNHP) and NatureServe’s scientific and technological expertise.  Currently, the program primarily supports the reporting and tracking of biodiversity-related targets under international agreements (such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework), regional agreements (such as the Arctic Council), and national agreements (such as national development plans and National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans).  The program’s currently funded work is in The Bahamas, Namibia, and South Korea.

The dashboard is located here.

I worked on the development of training videos and a rounded curriculum for use in the Bahamas. This had to be solid instructional material that would support the Dashboard well into the future in different municipalities around the world. I created 20 videos demonstrating the capabilities of the dashboard and Esri GIS systems as a whole.

Here is one example video from the curriculum:

The second project I worked on with The Colorado Natural Heritage Program was focused on creating a reproducible GIS workflow for identifying highly sensitive BARRENS ecosystems in Colorado to assist in legislative decisions on their protection. This data and workflow would later feed into the Wetlands Mapper Tool.

I created the full GIS workflow for this project which used a combination of the Esri suite of tools as well as developing our own bespoke in-house automated ecosystem detection model, using what I had learned from the Agroforestry project.

ESS440_Project7_FinalReport