About
I am a forest biometrician and the founder and principal of Siskiyou Biometrics, an independent forest biometrics practice based in Ashland, Oregon. The practice provides review, design, and strategy for the forest inventory and biometric systems supporting timberland investment and forest management decisions.
I hold a BS and MS in forestry from Michigan State University, where my research centered on small area estimation and Bayesian methods for large forest inventories. I am the original author of rFIA, an open-source R package built to simplify access to the US Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) database, and the lead author of peer-reviewed research on forest change in the western United States, published in Nature Communications.
Before founding the practice, I spent nearly five years at Campbell Global leading the forest biometrics and inventory team, supporting acquisitions and timberland valuations worldwide and operations across four countries. I have held every seat at the table where a model meets a consequential decision: building the estimators, publishing the methods, and relying on them under fiduciary pressure.
I also founded and run Rogue Evergreens, where we steam-distill and bottle single-species essential oils and hydrosols from Pacific Northwest conifers by hand.
Publications
- 2023Emergent hotspots of biotic disturbances and their consequences for forest resilience. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Coauthor.
- 2022Simplifying small area estimation with rFIA: a demonstration of tools and techniques. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. Lead author.
- 2021Over half of western United States’ most abundant tree species in decline. Nature Communications. Lead author.
- 2021Advancing broad-scale forest health evaluation and monitoring with rFIA. Forest Health Monitoring: National Status, Trends, and Analysis 2020, chapter 7 (US Forest Service General Technical Report SRS-261). Lead author.
- 2020rFIA: An R package for estimation of forest attributes with the US Forest Inventory and Analysis database. Environmental Modelling & Software. Lead author.
Software
- 2019rFIA, an R package for the Forest Inventory and Analysis database. First released on CRAN in October 2019. Original author.
Talks, posters, and thesis
- 2020Unlocking the Forest Inventory and Analysis Database: Applications to Nation-Wide Forest Health Monitoring. MS thesis, Michigan State University. Thesis, defense slides.
- 2020Opportunities for small area estimation with rFIA. Small Area Estimation in FIA User Group Meeting. Slides, examples.
- 2019rFIA: Unlocking the Potential of the FIADB in R. FIA Stakeholders Science Meeting, Knoxville, Tennessee.
- 2018Vertical Stream Concavity as a Predictor of Solute Transport Behavior in Mountain Headwater Streams. Ecosystem Informatics Summer Institute symposium, Corvallis, Oregon. Slides.
- 2017Connecting the Dots: A Landscape Approach for Michigan CWD (chronic wasting disease). The Wildlife Society annual conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Best student poster. Slides.