Michael France Nelson

I wear many hats: GIS practitioner, educator, ecologist, botanist, researcher, programmer, and life-long learner. Most of all, I am a professional who uses my skills and experience to excel in new and challenging roles.

I have extensive experience teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and conducting and publishing original research. Through research, course work, and teaching, I've also gained experience programming in serveral languages including R, Java, JavaScript, and HTML.

My goal is to leverage my experience and skills, which I have developed primarily in academic settings, in a more hands-on environment. My ideal organization is one that values my technical abilities, my eagerness to learn, and ability to work independently, as a team member, and as a leader.

For more detailed information, check out my CV or resume!

Check out my profiles on LinkedIn and ResearchGate.

Experience

Education

Presentations: Slides and Resources

Here you can find slides and other materials from a few of my more recent presentations

• Working with Spatial Data in R A presentation I gave on using R as a GIS and the basics of importing, displaying, and manipulating spatial data in R

• Slides for a presentation on invasive species and climate change that I gave to the city of Gardiner NY. The invaders for sale portion of the talk was based on Eve Beaury’s article Invaders for Sale.

• Slides for a presentation on invasive species and climate change that I gave to the Pennsylvania Department of Natural Resources (DCNR).

---

Portfolios

My web map portfolio from the course GEOG414: Programming for Geospatial Data Science II. (UCLA MAGIST Program, Spring 2024).

My research highlights portfolio: a selection of my research projects and publications.

Courses

These are the homepages (including all course materials) for the courses I taught as a Lecturer at UMass.

• Analysis of Environmental Data (Lecture and Lab): Required course for all incoming ECO grad students. Broad survey of analytical technques for environmental data. Preparation for further study of advanced methods such as GLMs, mixed models, and multivariate methods. Introduction to programming in R.

• Introduction to Quantitative Ecology: A first undergraduate course in statistics, geared toward environmental science majors. Taught using R.

• Introduction to Geographic Information Systems: Introductory course in GIS.

• Spatial Data Analysis in R: a course covering the basics of spatial statistics, taught using R.