What the Wildlife Taught Me About Sensor setup
A field note on the gap between a system that works and a system that keeps working, written mostly while replacing cable. »
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at UC Santa Barbara, working under Kelly Caylor and Anna Trugman. My dissertation asks a very simple question: how do trees survive a drought? Answering it has meant hauling LiDAR, thermal cameras, sapflow probes and a small solar-powered telemetry network out to the Dangermond Preserve — and then persuading all of it to keep reporting while the local wildlife chews through the cabling.
Research
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Scaling Evapotranspiration Across Thermal Scales
How much of the variability in dryland ET disappears when you coarsen land surface temperature — and which of seven ET models notice.
PythonSLURMNEONGoogle Earth Engine
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Drought Resilience in Coast Live Oak Woodlands
My dissertation — measuring how individual Quercus agrifolia use water across a slope aspect gradient at Point Conception.
LiDARUAS thermalMultispectralSapflow
Things I have built
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A Modular UAS Datalogger
Custom airborne instrumentation for atmospheric boundary layer profiling — wind, radiation, temperature, humidity and imagery on one payload.
KiCADZephyrRTOSMicroPythonDJI M600 Pro
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Dangermond Digital Twin
A full-stack, real-time web map of the field transect showing the live status of individual trees.
PythonJavaScriptWeb mapping
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UCSB.sapflow v1.5.2
Custom sapflow sensor hardware — a Beslity et al. (2022) Js⁵ derivative, built because commercial units cost more than the budget allowed.
KiCADArduinoMicroPythonSensor calibration
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A LoRa/Starlink Field Observatory
An autonomous telemetry network streaming met, soil moisture and sapflow data off a remote coastal preserve in near real time.
LoRaStarlinkMicroPythonZephyrRTOS
From the blog
My all time favorite article
Nikola Tesla was punk before it was cool. »