New Updates to the California Rare Plant Inventory: version 9.5

After leaving Rincon Consultants in 2022, I continued to collaborate with the California Native Plant Society (CNPS)along with two colleagues, Andrew Walter of The Jones Payne Group, and Mark Naftzger of Studio Simple, to update the the CNPS Online Inventory of Rare Plants, that we later renamed the Rare Plant Inventory. In January, 2023, CNPS to announced a series of new features and updates to California’s online inventory of rare plants. The Rare Plant Inventory (RPI) is a widely-used resource guiding rare plant protection, conservation planning, land acquisition, and management in California. The updated 9.5 version of the RPI added a suite of powerful new search capabilities and more

CNPS Online Inventory of Rare Plants v9.0

For the past year, while working for Rincon Consultants, I have been working with two colleagues, Andrew Walter of The Jones Payne Group, and Mark Naftzger of Studio Simple, to develop the latest version of the California Native Plant Society's Online Inventory of Rare Plants.

Some Coveted Programming Skills

To follow-up on an earlier post I wrote this year about GIS Skills, I recently read a story in Readwrite Enterprise outlining 15 programming skills most coveted by employers (http://readwrite.com/2013/04/09/15-programming-skills-most-coveted-by-employers). While their story was aimed at the development community, two of the 15 skills outlined in their story are definitely needed by GIS Analysts and...

A Maxent Script Tool for ArcGIS

As part of my PhD research at the University of Arizona where I study biogeography, biodiversity and macroecology, I have been part of a group looking at large-scale biodiversity questions for New World plants. In this role, I have been responsible for generating many species distribution models using Stephen Phillip's Maxent software (and R with the Dismo...

Speedy Attribute Editing with a Custom ArcMap Add-In

One of my colleagues, TerraSystems Southwest, is assisting The Nature Conservancy in Tucson with the Sonoran Desert Disturbed Lands Analysis project. As part of their scope of work, they were asked to assess the level and type of land disturbance for over 100,000 1-square mile hexagons covering the Sonoran Desert. As you might expect, editing the attributes...