My name is Emily Jackson, I am currently in the GIS Graduate Certificate program at University of West Florida, and I work full-time as a fisheries biologist on artificial reefs for Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
I love Florida's diverse and vibrant marine ecosystems! I did my BSc in Environmental Science and Policy in Tampa at University of South Florida and completed my MSc research over in California at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I've worked around and with GIS off and on at different points through my career, it's been fascinating to watch it grow from a buggy not-well-understood (by our remote field station at least) mapmaking software into the powerhouse of geospatial data display, collection, and analysis it is in the field today. One of the driving passions in my career is the interconnected nature of complex productive trophic systems, nutrient cycling, and coastal communities. I love GIS and ESRI products because they give me additional tools for translating ecosystem science and making it accessible to those community stakeholders.
When I took my position with FWC I also took up responsibility for the archival geodatabase of all Florida's artificial reefs (the FARD). While I am comfortable enough with GIS to run the database and do maintenance, I want to be able to use the FARD to help make even more of our habitat and assessment data accessible and easily visualized by the public and county managers. My goal for enrolling in the UWF Certificate Program has been to be able to push the FARD to its full potential. This year during my GIS Internship I added new layers to the FARD for shipwrecks vs artificial reefs, as well as created a new data layer, custom symbology, and data entry system for our fish census surveys.
Here is an overview of some of the research I've done so far, and the places that matter to me:
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