Justin Welty

I started my USGS career by creating and entering the initial data for the Land Treatment Digital Library, a database designed to store tabular data, spatial locations, and documentation on Bureau of Land Management legacy vegetation manipulation treatments. The project is now in its 14th year and has grown to include all legacy treatment data across the contiguous western United States. In 2021, we officially released the Land Treatment Exploration Tool to allow users with any level of GIS experience to explore the history of their planned treatment area and assist them with identifying the best treatment methods for the area. In 2014, I started learning web design and became the lead web designer and database manager for the Conservation Efforts Database (CED). While the initial CED was designed to capture land treatment efforts implemented to preserve greater sage-grouse habitat, it continues to grow and expand. We now have two functional modules, a Sagebrush/Sage-grouse module and a Gunnison sage-grouse module. We are currently building a third module to capture cutthroat trout conservation efforts, demographics, genetics, and habitat data. In addition, I am the lead programmer for and manage the USGS Combined Wildland Fire Dataset. We currently have a team of around 30 wild and prescribed fire experts from multiple agencies and states helping us combine and present fire information from over 40 unique fire datasets.

Other duties include (1) creating mobile data collection apps using ArcGIS Survey123 and Collector, (2) assisting and advising users across the USGS and other agencies and groups in the design of mobile data collection forms, (3) creating and editing manuscripts for publication in scientific literature, (4) spatial mapping design and programming in ArcGIS and Python for work on multiple projects including those involved in global warming, toolbox development, and species habitat modeling, (5) assisting other staff at the station with spatial mapping and database issues, and (6) figure design for manuscript publications using programs such as Adobe Photoshop.