We’re excited to welcome our new Bromery Intern, Kelsey Huelsman. Kelsey is joining us for the next year through an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Research Participation Program.

Who is Kelsey?

Kelsey is a recent University of Virginia graduate, with a Ph.D. in Environmental Science. Her doctoral research used fine-scale hyperspectral remote sensing to examine spectral variability and invasive plant species detection in northwestern Virginia plant communities (Huelsman et al. 2023). As she embarks on her post-doctoral career, Kelsey plans to continue studying plant communities, their biodiversity, and remote sensing applications.

What will Kelsey be doing?

Kelsey will be working with the Species Observations Group in the Science Analytics and Synthesis (SAS) Biogeographic Science Branch, synthesizing patterns in unplanned vegetation occurrence data and planned vegetation surveys across space, time, and scientific studies. Using multiple vegetation datasets from Virginia and the Mid-Atlantic, including occurrences in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and vegetation surveys conducted by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) and the Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA), she will be assessing the impacts of sampling bias on measures of biodiversity, providing a foundation for future applications of GBIF data to assess and monitor national biodiversity. The codebase and documentation generated from this investigative process will provide a customizable workflow for additional geographic, taxonomic, and temporal applications.

Citations

Huelsman, Kelsey, et al. “Spectral variability in fine-scale drone-based imaging spectroscopy does not impede detection of target invasive plant species.” Frontiers in Remote Sensing 3 (2023): 1085808. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsen.2022.1085808