Projects

In partnership with The Nature Conservancy, my Master's Project consists of understanding wildlife occupancy in logged forests compared to areas impacted by natural disturbance and undisturbed areas in Belize using camera trap data. The aim is to quantify if reduced impact logging is a tenable approach to sustainability harvesting forests while maintaining biodiversity. 

Colleagues from Duke Law, Nicholas School of the Environment and Dalhousie University teamed up to host a workshop on transboundary management of marine species at risk with representatives from the US, Canada and more. Multiple sectors and fields presented on the issues facing some of the most iconic and endangered species in our oceans such as the North Atlantic Right Whale. The team is currently working to produce a report summarizing the workshop and solutions for the future of these transboundary species.

As a part of Duke's Rainforest Engineering XPRIZE Team I worked in a group to create a workflow for drone mapping of tropical rainforests. This consisted of determining optimal autonomous flight paths to get the best input data for modeling, which softwares produced the most accurate 2D and 3D models, and what insights could be gained from the data. 

In partnership with Duke University Bass Connections and colleagues in Madagascar, I am a part of team working on biocultural sustainability in Madagascar with a focus on studying changes in lemur occupancy and distribution in the face of growing deforestation within Madagascar.

During the summer of 2022 with the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability, I coded an inland flood analysis that uses publicly available data to quantify downstream flood risk area and wetland attenuation percentage to a desired scale. Using publicly available data allows for increased accessibility in flood analysis that can be used across different management levels. 

While at the Duke Lemur Center, I worked on a team to produce easy to use ethograms for tracking lemur behavior and enrichment use. I then coded a script to analyze the data collected and produce activity budgets of individual lemurs and produce graphics of these breakdowns.