Ben T Lohre
Ben Lohre is a computer scientist in the Ecoinformatics and Wildlife Technology branch (ECOTech) at the Fort Collins Science Center, continually learning new technologies and strategies for solving software, data, and cloud engineering problems at the USGS.
North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat)
The North American Bat Monitoring Program, or NABat, provides information to a broad constituency garnered from a continental-scale, long-term program, and allows them to better document changes in bat populations, estimate extinction risk, set conservation priorities, and evaluate the effectiveness of conservation actions.
NABat Partner Portal
The Partner Portal serves as the interface between NABat partners and the NABat database, enabling users to upload, archive, and access their own data or request data from other NABat partners. The Partner Portal also features a variety of web-based tools to assist users in project planning and mapping.
I have been with the Fort Collins Science Center for seven years, contributing to a diverse array of projects, technologies, and systems. My recent experience encompasses the design, development, and ongoing maintenance of the following: infrastructure provisioning in Amazon Web Services (AWS), relational databases (Postgres), RESTful and GraphQL APIs (NodeJS and Grails), front-end applications (Angular), and data pipeline orchestration using Python and/or other scripting languages. For the last few years, I have focused on the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat), a continental scale bat population monitoring program. A multi-disciplinary team comprised of biologists, quantitative ecologists, statisticians, data scientists, outreach and user support staff, and software engineers work collaboratively to provide the services, resources, digital infrastructure, and science that support the success of the broader NABat collective. This USGS team works closely alongside federal partners and external end users to develop technical solutions for complex applied problems relevant to decision workflows that cover or consider bats. With a small, dedicated team, NABat software systems have accrued over 100 million measurement observations from 500 organizations including over 80 terabytes of acoustic data. We strive to reduce the burden of data collection by offering innovative, user focused, technical solutions for priority science programs and initiatives that include custom cloud-based applications.
