For this assignment in ESM 262 Environmental Computing, we were asked to come up with a creative function, visualize the outputs, and then turn that function into a working package for public use. My partner and I created a function that conducts a sentiment analysis on lyrics for songs in the top 100. The required input is an artist name (e.g. Madonna), and the output is a data frame which contains a column for that artists’ Top 100 song titles and a column for the sentiment values for those songs.

The colonial history of Guam (hereafter referred to as Guåhan from the indigenous CHamoru language) is not over, and its impacts carry into the present, especially for people and the environment. Initiating full self-governance of Guåhan is a critical step to ensure lasting environmental protection. Without sovereignty, Guåhan will continue to experience environmental degradation and pollution, particularly from the US military, with unfavorable impacts on fisheries leading to food insecurity and cultural losses.

The assignments included on this page are snippets of assignments that I submitted for ESM 270 Conservation Planning. The full assignments also included co-written lab reports from myself and a peer, of which only the summaries are included here. All maps below are my own, created with ArcGIS. Lab 4 Summary: Jaguars (Panthera onca) of the Talamanca-Osa region of Southern Costa Rica are experiencing habitat fragmentation from human land use. A Circuitscape and Linkage Mapper analysis of least cost paths and land use types in this area show that agricultural pastures and palm plantations are the largest threats to jaguars.

This class was intended to build a working knowledge of GIS theory and practice in a single quarter. GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, are used to visualize, analyze, and interpret geographic data. Three of my assignments for this class are displayed below. Assignment 2 This map reveals how sea-level rise will impact downtown Santa Barbara spatially and financially. Created with QGIS. Assignment 3 This map highlights the top ten potential sites for wind turbines in Santa Barbara County, based on a multi-criteria analysis.

Stepping into the forests on the island of Guam, one may notice that something critically important is missing: the sound of birds. The cause of this silence is the invasive non-native predator, the Brown treesnake, which was introduced to the island after World War II. The ecological cascade following the arrival of this species parallels Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, which explores the consequences of the pesticide DDT on bird reproduction and the resulting deficit of birds and bird calls.