Originally from Canada, I grew up in the mountains of the US state of Colorado. Following the completion of my Honours degree in the UK I found myself in Kyrgyzstan for a stint before spending several years working for the Nature Conservancy in the US Virgin Islands. I finished my MSc in Conservation Biology at the University of Queensland in 2012. 

My background includes research on Spanish orchids and soil chemistry, remote sensing techniques of coral reefs, modelling the impacts of interactions of multiple coral stressors on future coral reef composition, spatially explicit mangrove ecosystem service evaluations in Fiji, and global mapping of wilderness loss; I currently do lots of work as a research assistant involving spatial mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and am a big proponent of open source solutions to GIS.