Co-founder and CEO, Salo Sciences

David is contributing to the Fuel Mapping & Fire Physics Team, the Wildfire Forecasting Team, and the Climate Change & Fire Projections Team by providing data on vegetation and tree mortality derived from high-resolution remote sensing imagery. These spatial data will be integrated with field-collected data to model future fuel loads in areas of high tree mortality. For the Climate Change & Fire Projections Team, he is supporting the integration of the LUCAS modeling framework with long-term wildfire models and an improved model of drought-induced tree mortality. David has more than six years of experience with satellite and airborne remote sensing imagery analytics and scientific modeling in ecological contexts. His expertise is in forest ecology, conservation policy, remote sensing of forest carbon, land use mapping, machine learning analytics, and high-performance computing. David worked closely with USGS to integrate wildfire and drought-induced tree mortality into the LUCAS model framework, and he has built alternative scenarios for land management, including scenarios for reduced wildfire severity. He also helped adapt the LUCAS model to run on distributed computing systems. David led Salo’s work to develop high-resolution maps of tree mortality for the Sierra National Forest. David holds a doctorate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Michigan.