For his environmental observation and informatics program leadership project, Eli Wilz worked with The Nature Conservancy’s Freshwater Resiliance Project, a two-year initiative to identify and map the resilience characteristics of all U.S. stream and river networks.
While historically the rivers and streams of the U.S. were once free-flowing, they have been fragmented into over 54,000 smaller segments by dams and other barriers, consequently impacting the biodiversity that lives in these freshwater systems.
The unique challenge for The Nature Conservancy project in assessing the status of these freshwater networks is the creation of a database of dam locations from disparate sources and expert knowledge. Wilz created an automation process to assess dam records, verify the location, and highlight necessary corrections. By using this tool, small teams can verify the locations of thousands of dams in just a few minutes.
Project Details
Full Title
Freshwater Resiliency: Network Mapping the Rivers of the United States
Deliverable
Script to organize information about dams
Environmental Topic
Water
Partner Organization
Skills Used in This Project
Data management
Programming
Get to Know Eli Wilz
Undergraduate Major
Informatics
Current Job
Data analyst, DataChat Inc.
How has the EOI program impacted your career?
“This program and final leadership project have prepared me for the uphill battle that is conservation in the 21st century. This program has helped me learn that nothing in the future conservation should be assumed. The many successes leading us to where we are today has been because of the intentional work of our predecessors. The range of this program allows what we have learned to be utilized in many disciplines, and now it is up to us to apply it.”
Why did you join EOI?
“I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in informatics and saw an innumerable number of my peers take jobs in the tech field. I joined this program because I believe that improving our technical capacity will be vital in implementing climate change solutions, and that if I wanted these problems to be addressed, I had to be willing to address them myself.”