We are thrilled to announce our new GIS Analyst is Tanya Muswera. Her bachelor’s is in geography, and she holds a double master’s in Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation for Environmental Modeling and Management.
Although a newcomer to Canada, Tanya is more than at-home in the world of spatial data, with many years of experience in GIS and remote sensing. She has worked in Europe and Africa, including as the GIS analyst at a research institute in Zimbabwe for the last four years.
At fRI Research, Tanya will help build and maintain our suite of GIS tools and models including the Grizzly Bear Tools, which track bear habitat change. She will also work with the Water and Fish Program using a tool called Netmap that allows us to reconstruct a watershed virtually in order to identify sources of sediment and other threats to watershed health.
This is just scratching the surface for all the different projects that our GIS Services assist with, and that variety is intriguing to Tanya. One set of skills she is excited to advance is coding in the R environment and writing python scripts for ArcGIS.
There will be other parts of the job that Tanya will be able to bring a wealth of expertise to, in particular her strong background in remote sensing. For example, in her work in Zimbabwe, she used Landsat imagery to assess tree cover and landscape change—a task that is essential for our Caribou and Healthy Landscapes Programs.
There are a lot of new experiences in store for Tanya, from the software and processes we use at fRI Research to her first Canadian winter. But the thing she says she’s most excited for is to travel and see all the different landscapes around her. We think she couldn’t have picked a better country.
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