Charlie Bettigole

“Charlie Bettigole is the Director of the GIS Center for Interdisciplinary Research at Skidmore College. Charlie teaches GIS (i.e. digital mapping) and remote sensing courses, and focuses on connecting students with a diverse array of applied, real-world research projects. Charlie has a background in Wildlife Biology and Spatial Ecology (M.S. University of Vermont). He is broadly interested in leveraging the latest technologies in geoinformatics and data science to help solve pressing ecological dilemmas. His current research is focused on optimizing sampling designs for mapping soil carbon, national-scale analyses of grazing system resiliency, and remote sensing of invasive species in the Adirondack Park, NY. Research highlights include a spatially-explicit count of the number of trees on earth (3.04 trillion), building tools and techniques to support large-scale mapping of soil carbon (stratifi web tool), and the use of LiDAR datasets to detect remnants of Maya land use patterns in northern Guatemala. Prior to arriving at Skidmore in 2019, Charlie was a co-founder and program director of the Ucross High Plains Stewardship Initiative at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies - a program focused on sustainable ranching and land management in the American West. Outside of work, you can find Charlie exploring the Adirondack Mountains by ski, mountain bike, and fly rod with his family.”