Speakers

Dr. Kyttä is an international leader in the use of participatory mapping to study the environmental experiences of people, especially in urban areas. Her research themes include social sustainability of the living environment, health-enhancing community structure, and child-friendly environments.

Dr. Reed works for the U.S. Forest Service in Ecosystem Management Coordination for the Washington Office.  He has been the leading advocate and expert for the use of participatory mapping for decision support in public land planning and management, especially national forest planning.

Dr. Brown is a leading international researcher in participatory mapping research methods (PPGIS/PGIS/VGI). His participatory mapping applications include forest planning, national park planning, assessment of ecosystem services, coastal and marine areas planning, and urban parks and open space planning. He founded the Landscape Values and PPGIS Institute to facilitate global research and communication about participatory spatial planning methods.

Dr. Jankowski is a leading expert in the field of Geographic Information Science (GIScience) with research interests in spatial decision making models and methods, public participation GIS (PPGIS), and volunteered geographic information (VGI) systems. Recent research includes participatory mapping applications and decision support systems for urban land use planning in Poland, and methods of preserving privacy in online location data.

Dr. Perkl is Esri’s Green Infrastructure Lead and an Industry Practice Lead for Environmental Services Companies and Natural Systems Geodesign in the Professional Services Division. As a Senior Consultant and Project Manager, Ryan provides thought leadership devoted to Esri’s Green Infrastructure Initiative and supports a wide variety of environmentally focused projects as part of Esri’s Natural Resources Team.

Prior to joining Esri, Ryan was an Assistant Professor of Planning at the University of Arizona where he taught a wide variety of classes including environmental spatial analysis, environmental land use planning and geodesign. He also engaged in an active research agenda that focused on conservation planning, landscape connectivity modeling, advanced spatial analysis and geodesign. In so doing, he has worked with local, state, and federal entities on collaborative and participatory driven scenario planning projects that spanned from natural resource management to regional planning.

Dr. McCall is a leading international researcher in social mapping and participatory GIS (PGIS) with communities to assess risks and vulnerability, territories, neighbourhoods, and landscapes. He has taught and run workshops in  Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Southern Africa, Eastern Africa, South Asia, Netherlands, Brasil, and Georgia.  He has published on PGIS, community management and planning, and disaster risk management.

Anna is planning geographer by origin. As part of her PhD studies on urban structures and children’s mobility at Aalto University she took part in developing a web mapping survey tool (softGIS) to aid public participation, which later evolved to Maptionnaire. In her academic career she concentrated on developing new ways of analysing PPGIS data together with registered based data statistically and geographically. Currently, she strives to help people and organisations around the world to co-create better urban milieus with the help of digital mapping technology.

Rebecca McLain has a PhD in Forest Management (Social Science specialization) from the University of Washington, an MSc in Land Resources from the University of Wisconsin, and a BA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Texas. She currently holds a research appointment with the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University, and previously was Co-Director and Senior Social Scientist at the Institute for Culture and Ecology. She has co-led PPGIS projects in the United States since 2009, including cultural values mapping projects on national forests in Oregon and Washington and community-based participatory mapping for climate action in Portland, Oregon. She is particularly interested in exploring approaches for developing long-term collaborative PPGIS partnerships between universities, government agencies, private firms, and community organizations.

Dr. Monteiro de Carvalho is a post-doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Public Health, University of São Paulo (USP), Department of Environmental Health.  Her current research projects include “Participative Geographic Information System for Social and Environmental Governance” and “Resilience and vulnerability at the urban nexus of food, water, energy and the environment”. She is also associate editor of the Ambiente & Sociedade journal.

She completed a DSc in Environmental Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) with an internship at the Royal Institute of Technology (Kunliga Tekniska Hogskolan – KTH) in Stockholm (Sweden).  She has conducted research on the socio-environmental impacts of expansion of palm oil for biodiesel in Pará state, Brazil, and other degraded Amazonian areas. She received a MSc in Remote Sensing from the National Institute of Space Research (INPE). Areas of interests include: climate change, urban sustainability and sustainable development, environmental health, Geographical Information Systems, and participatory methodologies.

Dr. Kelly Heber Dunning has eight years of experience working on the human dimensions of natural resources and has worked all over the world on both terrestrial and marine ecosystems in places such as East Africa, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, the US, the EU, and now in the Congo Basin. She currently manages the Mapping for Rights programme at the Rainforest Foundation which assists Congo Basin Forest Communities and local civil society to collect data on traditional resource tenure and use these maps to engage decision-makers. Before working for the Rainforest Foundation, Kelly received her PhD in Natural Resource Management and Environmental Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with research funded through a U.S. Fulbright Award. Her research, based in the MIT Science Impact Collaborative and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Marine Policy Centre, examined the resilience of socio-ecological systems (specifically coastal ecosystems such as coral reefs and mangroves) in communities across Malaysia and Indonesia. Kelly’s began mapping in 2009 in the private sector, working with the Swedish firm DataGrid Inc. to sensitize community level stakeholders on the importance of mapping and land use planning.

Efraim D. Roxas is the current Chair of the Department of Community and Environmental Resource Planning at the College of Human Ecology, University of the Philippines Los Baños. He is also an affiliate faculty in the Faculty of Management and Development Studies, UP Open University.

He is a licensed Environmental Planner and serves as Secretary to the Board of Philippine Institute of Environmental Planners (2017-2018). He is a practitioner of participatory methods in planning and decision making with integration of remote sensing and Geographic Information System. His advocacy includes empowering youth leaders for environmental stewardship and climate change adaptation.

Ashley Shaw is a graduate student in the School of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research themes include land use planning, natural resource and forest management, Indigenous studies and the application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Her current project focuses on the process of incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into forest management decisions. This may be done by visually representing this knowledge via GIS maps. By doing so, planning managers and decisions makers may be better informed about the land and resource use within the forest by different communities.

Ashley has broad experience working with various initiatives which focus on social and environmental justice, especially regarding marginalized communities. She also has extensive experience working within an inter- and trans- disciplinary context. Disciplines she is broadly trained in include sociology, anthropology, archaeology, computer science, Greek mythology, and medicine.

Charlynne is a Research Associate at NC State University’s College of Natural Resources, working with the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management and the Center for Geospatial Analytics. She has over 20 years of experience in park and natural resource management having served as a park ranger, historic interpreter, researcher and educator. Charlynne’s research focus is on participatory geographic information systems for natural resource management, planning, and the stakeholder communication process. This work includes data visualization, and place based decision-making through experiential applications. She supplements GIS expertise with skills in supervision, leadership, and conflict resolution. Charlynne is a certified Geographic Information Systems Professional (GISP) and a Natural Resources Leadership Institute Fellow.

Simon Hoyte is an anthropologist in the Extreme Citizen Science Research Group (ExCiteS) at University College London. ExCiteS works to create bottom-up citizen science projects in collaboration with disempowered and marginalised peoples who are rarely involved in data collection. The data collection and sharing platform Sapelli has been trialled in the Congo basin and Brazil, providing a means for illiterate and non-literate indigenous communities to be involved in decision-making processes through participatory mapping and reporting, thereby re-gaining a level of self-determination.

In partnership with the Zoological Society of London, Simon’s current work engages indigenous Baka hunter-gatherer and Bantu farming communities in Cameroon with Sapelli using Android ultra-rugged smartphones. As part of a Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) process, communities located around three strategic areas for wildlife trafficking are undergoing community-led development of locally-relevant Sapelli projects to report illegal wildlife crime, thereby contributing vital geo-located data for conservation and empowering indigenous and local communities in the process.

Sini Kantola is writing her doctoral thesis at the University of Oulu (Finland), Geography Research Unit. She previously worked at Natural Resources Institute Finland on different projects. Kantola’s doctoral thesis is on the participation of citizens in land use planning and decision making in sparsely populated Northern areas where she is examining whether public participation GIS (PPGIS) increases interactivity among local citizens, authorities and politicians.

Randy has a Master’s degree in Geography (GIS specialization) from Portland State University, and is the Community GIS Project Leader at Portland State University’s Institute of Metropolitan Studies. He was most recently published as lead cartographer in Portlandness: a Cultural Atlas. Currently, he heads the IMS Neighborhood Pulse project, a community-focused data, research, and mapping web portal. As a geography and GIS instructor, Randy always delights in introducing people to the field and tools of geography, as well sharing his love of cartography.

Len Kne, GISP has extensive experience with GIS and Information Technologies in higher education, construction, government, and non-profit organizations in his work at U-Spatial, a center at the University of Minnesota providing support for spatial research. He is on the faculty of the Master of Geographic Information Science program and teaches project management and spatial databases. He is looking forward to the day when everyone is thinking spatially.

Adam is a community organizer and advocacy planner with experience incubating community projects and programs at the grassroots level, including his work on climate change as a co-founder of nonprofit, 350PDX, and more recently engaging the Lents community on livability issues through local nonprofit, Green Lents. Brunelle is committed to bottom-up change and community-led advocacy, focusing his work on improving livability, preserving affordability, and fostering community control in the Lents area. He received his Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning from PSU in 2016, and was awarded the Excellence in Sustainability: Inspiring Student Award in 2016 by the Institute for Sustainable Solutions.

Rudo is a geographer with the Amazon Conservation Team who specializes in participatory mapping and data collection with forest communities in Suriname and other Amazonian countries. For the past two years, Rudo has been working together with the Matawai Maroons of Suriname to map local knowledge and compile comprehensive maps of their ancestral lands, and he is currently engaged with a participatory project to record oral histories about historically significant places in these lands, and the development of an interactive map-based platform to host these recordings. He also has been working on developing novel data collection and monitoring techniques using smartphone applications with indigenous communities in Suriname and Brazil.

An anthropologist and web developer by training, Rudo is also active in the implementation of indigenous life plans in Suriname, and the curation of web mapping communications tools (such as ESRI’s story maps) about indigenous rights and environmental pressures in the Amazon rainforest.

Gregor has worked with indigenous communities throughout the Amazon Basin on land rights issues, the impacts of extractive industries, and supporting indigenous peoples’ right to self determination. He worked in Peru for 7 years as founder and director of Shinai, a grass-roots non-profit organization, helping communities map their territory and resource use, and set up a community-run environmental monitoring system for Achuar communities affected by contamination from oil drilling. Prior to Digital Democracy he worked for 4 years as Peru Program Coordinator for Amazon Watch, leading a campaign to successfully stop Talisman from drilling for oil in Achuar territory in a remote and biodiverse area of Amazon rainforest in Peru.

Malin  works for Verde as a Community Organizer and Program Coordinator in northeast Portland Oregon. She was one of the key organizers for the Living Cully Walks project, identifying transportation infrastructure gaps and barriers to get existing new environmental amenities in the Cully Neighborhood. Verde serves communities by building environmental wealth through Social Enterprise, Outreach and Advocacy. Verde has been working for over 10 years in the Cully Neighborhood in NE Portland for environmental and social justice in the community.

Chelsey is a Research Associate in the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University. Her work leverages crowdsourced and volunteered geographic information for natural resource management, visitor use and impact monitoring in protected natural areas, and park planning. She also works with emerging geospatial technologies to engage youth and the public in participatory science.

Kitty is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and research associate for Biosphere Foundation, a non-profit organization that works with communities in Indonesia to promote marine resource stewardship. She uses collaborative mapping tools like SeaSketch and kite aerial photography to study how volunteered geographic information can reveal people’s priorities regarding environmental issues. Prior to graduate school Kitty spent several years aboard Biosphere Foundation’s research vessels conducting coral reef ecological surveys throughout the South Pacific and Southeast Asia.

Zachary Neumann is a GIS Solutions Architect/GIS Developer for the United States Forest Service. Zachary studied at Portland State University and has a B.S. in Environmental Science and Management and a minor in GIS. Zachary has worked with the Talking Points Collaborative Mapping Team to move the agencies public participatory GIS application from a USGS platform to the Esri platform. He has developed workflows, written documentation, demoed the application to regions across the agency, and will be giving his first talk at the Esri User’s conference in San Diego.