With over 20 years of software development experience in industrial manufacturing, enterprise IT, and Cloud Computing research lab settings, my career has centred on engineering practical Information Technology solutions to address real-world challenges.
With life-long enthusiasm for both wildlife and cartography, I have always been interested in applications of IT in the sustainability and biodiversity domains.
Under the guidance of the internationally renowned staff at the National Centre for Geocomputation, the Department of Geography, and the Department of Computer Science at Maynooth University in Ireland, I have been able to apply my software development, data management, and scientific analysis experience to extract insights from geospatial data.
- Which areas in a town should be prioritised for interventions to encourage sustainable commuting?
- What sites across a county might be most appropriate for environmental and education amenities? What about interpretive signage, viewing platforms and hides that can be used to observe wildlife during the day and the dark sky at night?
- What do almost 750,000 raw observations extracted from 21 independent datasets tell us about the recent decline of the Yellowhammer / Buíóg / Emberiza citrinella in Ireland? Is it possible or even appropriate to consolidate data from nationwide surveys with adhoc observations? Can satellite imagery and other habitat data be used to identify important correlations? Can insights be represented visually?
These are some of the geospatial data challenges that I have successfully tackled using a range of the latest commercial and open-source GIS, data analysis and visualization technologies. I have also helped advance these very technologies, developing and publishing an open-source plugin that dramatically simplifies the creation of boundaries in OpenStreetMap when they are aggregations of smaller boundaries previously defined.
It has been a pleasure to liaise with ecologists, physicists, national survey coordinators and field workers in the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Birdwatch Ireland, the National Biodiversity Data Centre, and the British Trust for Ornithology in the pursuit of answers to these questions.
I am very interested to hear of geospatial data challenges that you may be facing – I invite you to get in touch.
John Kennedy