About Me

Hi 👋, I’m Erik. I’m on a mission to help aspiring data scientists in the fields of conservation, social impact and global development.

education

I studied environmental science with a focus on economics at Colorado State University. I was interested in how economic incentives could catalyze better stewardship of the environment.

While at CSU I wrote a weekly column for the student newspaper, the Collegian. You can read more on my previous blog the 651st word. I was also a fellow with the Center for Collaborative Conservation and had the chance to work on their Colorado Conservation Exchange which (some years later) I helped launch as the Peaks to People Water Fund.

I returned to school in 2024 to earn a Masters in Data Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder. I have also earned the Earth Lab’s Earth Data Analytics Professional Certificate.

career

I spent the first few years of my career working on-the-ground to protect and restore natural areas in Colorado. I worked directly in conservation and mitigation banks–areas of protected habitat intended to offset losses in advance of unavoidable impacts.

When it was time to hang up my boots I started with the Colorado State Land Board to help develop monetize ecosystem services, leading to the first conservation bank on state trust lands. Through this work I met the team at Environmental Incentives.

At Environmental Incentives we were working to flesh out and promote a groundbreaking new concept in conservation: that major funders of conservation should buy outcomes, not pay for inputs. I found my niche leading inter-disciplinary groups of scientists, academics and practitioners to develop science-based methods for measuring outcomes. We called these programs Credit Exchanges and the crediting protocols Habitat Quantification Tools (HQTs).

I developed the crediting protocols for the Nevada Conservation Credit System and adapted it for similar programs in Wyoming, Idaho, Montana and Oregon for the greater sage-grouse. I went on to develop similar approaches for the monarch butterfly and other pollinators, working with collaborators across the monarch migration route from Mexico to Canada. For this work our consortium was awarded the Natural Resource Conservation Achievement Award from the U.S. Geological Survey.

This chapter of my career was focused on developing simple approaches to measuring environmental outcomes that could be applied rapidly and at scale. Along the way I learned the tools needed to collect, manage and analyze these data, including statistics, programming, machine learning, geographic information systems, and more. I went on to teach these skills to teams around the world as a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

While working with these teams I identified that knowledge management, not just data management, was a limiting factor for the efficacy of programs. To fill this gap, I developed data hubs like the Guatemala Data Hub and used the latest latest technologies, including knowledge graphs and Large Language Models (LLMs), to develop custom applications to support discovery of scientific and institutional knowledge across large organizations.

In my experience, the fields of conservation, social impact and global development are the most underserved in the applications of data science and technology. I work to help aspiring data scientists in these fields leverage new technologies to solve today’s toughest challenges.

Past clients and partners include the Environmental Defense Fund, Walton Family Foundation, State of Colorado, Nevada Department of Conservation, Idaho Fish and Game, The Nature Conservancy, U.S. Agency for International Development, University of Minnesota, and many others.