Keeping decades of ecological data flowing
The Forest Ecosystem Monitoring Cooperative (FEMC) aggregates long-term ecological data from across the Northeast — forest health surveys, soil chemistry, water quality, atmospheric deposition, and more. That data powers a suite of public dashboards used by researchers, agency staff, and the public.
I work on the data side of that operation: keeping the ingestion pipelines healthy, the relational databases tidy, and the SQL behind each dashboard accurate and performant.
What I do
- Maintain and extend ETL pipelines that aggregate data from partner agencies and field collections
- Manage and troubleshoot the relational databases that back the public dashboards
- Diagnose and fix SQL issues — both performance and correctness — across legacy queries
- Reconcile inconsistencies in long-running historical datasets
- Document data flows so future analysts can pick up where I leave off
Outcome
Dashboards stay reliable, data updates land on schedule, and the team spends less time chasing broken queries and more time doing the science the data is meant to support.