Western Pond Turtle Habitat Model
Predicting where a threatened turtle can still live.
Research project
The Western Pond Turtle has lost most of the low-elevation wetland it used to live in, and the crews looking for what is left have far more ground to cover than they have days to cover it.
The model reads publicly available satellite imagery and climate data and describes which stretches of the landscape still look like turtle habitat: water that holds through the summer, the open banks they need for basking, and the upland ground they walk to when they nest.
What comes out is a place to start — somewhere to send a crew first, rather than everywhere at once. It is a research project and we treat it as one: a shortlist for the people who know the ground, not a replacement for them.
Invasive Aquatic Plant Early Warning
Catching invasions in Oregon waterways before they spread.
Research project
An invasive aquatic plant is cheap to pull out of a pond in its first season and close to impossible to remove once it has taken a lake. The whole game is noticing early.
The approach compares Sentinel-2 satellite passes over Oregon waterways across a season and looks for the water bodies where surface vegetation is changing in the way an early invasion changes it.
A manager gets a short list of places worth a look, while looking is still cheap. It is a research project — the judgement about what is actually growing out there stays with the person who goes and checks.
Torrent Salamander Seep Detection
Finding the cold seeps a rare salamander depends on.
Research project
The Southern Torrent Salamander lives in cold groundwater seeps small enough to walk past without seeing and easy to erase with a single pass of heavy equipment.
The tool reads LiDAR terrain data and looks for the landforms where groundwater comes to the surface — the shape of the ground rather than the water itself, which is what makes seeps findable across a whole watershed instead of one trail at a time.
It produces candidate locations for someone to walk to and confirm. It is a research project, and the point of it is to get the small places onto a map before somebody drives through one.
