About Me

My journey began in my undergraduate degree, Bachelor of Science in Environmental Sciences, through this degree I learned of the different technologies and techniques used in this broad field.

I centered much of my studies around Avian Ecology and Geographic Information Systems. This culminated in my senior capstone project, "Home-range and Territory use of the Pacific Wren." Here I combined my two great passions, birds and GIS. In this 9 month project I measured summer breeding territories and compared them against the home-range size in the winter non-breeding season. It was through this work that I learned that spatial analysis is the direction I wanted to head in my graduate degree.

After my BS I worked a series of field positions. Working these field positions continues to inform my decisions in my analysis and how I design my maps. How will field crews interpret my maps? How can this data be expressed in a way that is useful for the end user?

Although I loved working in the field, in my graduate work I wanted to focus more on analytical techniques, statistics, and programming skills. I became more interested in what we do with the data after the field work is complete and how this data can inform decisions.

Publications

Wintering Destinations of the Monterey Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus slevini)

Accepted to the Journal of Field Ornithology, published March, 2021. In this role I primarily took on analysis and cartographic responsibilities. Although other maps were made, it was necessary to develop a custom python tool written in ArcPro to display error bars on the winter geolocator map (pictured here). The tool was designed and tested in ESRIs model builder before being finalized in python. To my knowledge a GIS tool for displaying east/west and north/south error independently has never been designed in an ESRI product. Notice that the standard div for each point is slightly different, this tool takes that into account. Code at the bottom of this page. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofo.12357

Identification of Logging roads in Point Reyes National Seashore

Accepted in May of 2022, for my Master's thesis I developed a deep learning algorithm to extract abandoned forest roads from high resolution LiDAR. See my thesis page for a breakdown of the road extraction workflow, or check out the thesis on Scholar Works.

Update for 2023! This work was accepted and published by the Journal of Remote Sensing by MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute). This paper was published in June of 2023 and you can find it here.

Python Code

This code was prototyped in ArcPro Model Builder and then adapted to a Python script toolbox. Whats nice about writing in arc toolboxes instead of scripts is it's completely self contained and contains everything the script needs to run. It's a pretty straightforward tool that could easily be adapted to another project needs. All that is required is a CSV with point locations and their east/west and north/south standard error. This automation runs through the points adding point data (in memory) where the extreme extents of the standard div are. Then it draws east/west and north/south error bars. For an example CSV check out: https://wwiskes.github.io/datadump/heth.csv (this is the actual data driving the map above).

Get in touch

Any questions at all just drop me a line, I usually respond within a couple days.

williamwiskes@gmail.com

Publications

Wintering Destinations of the Monterey Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus slevini)

Identification of Logging roads in Point Reyes National Seashore

Python Code

Contracts