Joshua Donato

Bio: With a Masters degree in Geography, focusing on environmental and natural resource management, and a Masters degree in Environmental Engineering I am very interested in the world around us, how we interact with it, and how to address problems that arise. Coupled with software development experience I am leveraging my skills and background to wrangle data and develop tools with the goal of making it easier and quicker for researchers to find and acquire data. On the environment side I am particularly interested in water quality issues, riparian management, stream restoration, and watershed management. On the technology side I spent about 4 years developing landbase change management and related software in the ESRI environment. For about the past 5.5 years I have been developing software at the University of Minnesota related to carbon sequestration research and for the Terra Populus project. My technical skills include Python, JavasScript, HTML, CSS, Django, SQL, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, GeoServer, C#.NET, and ESRI technology.

Terra Populus: Integrated Data on Population and Environment

The Terra Populus project at the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) seeks to enable research, learning, and policy analysis by providing integrated spatiotemporal data describing people and their environment. Historically the MPC has provided one of the world's largest collections of integrated world-wide temporal population datasets. Terra Pop is now enabling linkages between environmental and population data by integrating vector and raster datasets. Instead of searching and downloading large spatial datasets (LULC, drought, precip, temp), TerraPop is housing them in one location where they can be explored along with census data and administrative boundaries. TerraPop mostly leverages open source software.

raster, vector, GeoServer, big data, web gis, open source, environment, census