Quantitative Ecologist

​2026

July

• Delivering an invited symposium talk in Building an AI-Ready Ecology and Biodiversity Data Infrastructure for Science and Action at the ESA Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, UT (theme: Ecology in an Era of Uncertainty).

• Serving as a panelist for Getting Into Graduate School and Finding the Right Program at the ESA Annual Meeting Career Central.

• Attended the in-person all-author meeting for The Nature Record in Washington, DC, joining more than 100 contributing authors to work through public comments and National Academies review ahead of the final draft. The Nature Record is the first holistic assessment of U.S. lands, waters, and wildlife and the benefits they provide, launched in 2022 as the federal National Nature Assessment and carried forward independently by its authors after the federal effort ended in early 2025. It was energizing to sit down with chapter teams from across the whole assessment, and I am proud that our Chapter 8: Status, Trends, and Future Projections of Terrestrial Ecosystems in the US chapter came through the National Academies review so strongly. The final assessment will be released online in fall 2026, with an MIT Press book to follow in 2027.

June

• Hosted OSU computer science undergraduate Nathan Cain in Maine for a collaborative work session and his first experience with ecological field work: photos!

• Symposium Building an AI-Ready Ecology and Biodiversity Data Infrastructure for Science and Action selected as a featured presentation in ESA's media tip sheet AI in ecology at ESA's 2026 Annual Meeting, distributed to journalists ahead of the meeting.

May

• Coauthored paper accepted in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. ForestForTrees: An R package to infer forest structure from remote sensing data

• Passed comprehensive exams and advanced to PhD candidacy, huge thank you to my committee: Sydne Record, Brian McGill, Jacquelyn Gilll, Jonathan Knott, and Angela Mech.

​April

• Presented a poster and workshopped newly developed AI tools at the first Imageomics Conference 2026 in Columnbus Ohio.

• Presented the NEON Virtual Challenge and awards at the FARR RCN Workshop 2026 In Washington DC

• Work from the National Ecological Observatory Network Virtual Challenge Hackathon was featured in the NEON Observatory Blog.

• Contributed to an accepted paper at the International Conference on Learning Representations on scalable trait annotation using machine learning.
  📄 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.01619
  🌐 https://osu-nlp-group.github.io/sae-trait-annotation/

March

• Featured in The New York Times coverage of the Nature Record, (formerly the U.S. National Nature Assessment) where I served as a coauthor on the chapter Terrestrial Ecosystems of the United States.

January

• ORISE work publised in Conservation Biology: Comprehensive framework for assessing and optimizing existing research networks

• Aly and Sydne Travel to the NEON Biorepository to finish up data collection on the NEON Carabid dataset after 9 months of data collection. 

2025

December

• Preliminary results from disseration chaper "Multimodal crown segmentation across spatial resolutions" presented at AGU 2025 New Orleans in session Seeing the Forests and the Trees: Advances in Active Remote Sensing Capabilities Leading to a Better Understanding of Forest Ecosystems and Natural Resource Management

October

• Passed PhD Dissertation Proposal Defense: Scaling Ecological Insights

September

• First dissertation chapter accepted in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, presenting evidence-based protocols for computer-vision imaging of biodiversity specimens.

• HDR Machine Learning challenge launches using subset of Biorepository Images 

August

• Funcapalooza workshop -- "Beyond Beetle Bodysize" team presenting final results and next steps for sparce autoencoder identified traits at the Imageomics Funcapalooza workshop in Columbus Ohio

• "Optimizing Image Capture for Computer Vision-Powered Taxonomic Identification and Trait Recognition of Biodiversity Specimens" poster presentation at ESA

• Delivered invited talk at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting Career Central: Thriving in Grad School. Also see Kathleen Carroll's resources developed for the original delivery of this session

• Photos from the Early Career Ecologist section Mentorship program at the ESA annual meeting -- organized by Kristen Emmitt and hosted by Aly 

• Aly passes the chair seat to Cait Rottler at the Early Career Ecologists Section Mixer at the ESA annual meeting in Baltimore MD

• Accepted three section awards on behalf of the ESA Early Career Ecologists Section -- Section of Merit, Innovative leadership structure, and Innovative Member Engagement 

• Represented early-career scientists at the ESA Governing Board meeting in Baltimore MD as Early Career Representative.

June

• Co-organized the Imageomics Funcapalooza workshop, advancing machine-learning approaches for functional trait discovery in biodiversity science. 

• Aly joins United By Nature Terrestrial chapter 

• "Fine-Grained Taxonomy with Vision Models: A Benchmark on Long-Tailed and Domain-Adaptive Classification" accepted to CV4Animals

• Early‐Career Publishing and Reviewing: Pitfalls and Perspectives published in ESA's Bulletin -- this paper represents a synthesis of survey results of prospectives from ESA early career ecologist section members and a resultant discourse with the Editors in Chief of the ESA journals

May

• Implemented imaging and automated processing workflows at the NEON Biorepository in Tempe, Arizona, training staff and scaling specimen digitization for carabid beetle collections processing pipeline.

April

• Aly and Rayeed present final results from the beetle-intake work at Pu'u Maka'ala field station at Imageomics all hands meeting in Columbus Ohio 

January

• AI and Ecology course spends three weeks in Hawaii -- Beetle intake group images the entire collection of Hawaiian beetles pinned at the Pu'u Maka'ala Natural Area Reserve NEON site

• Field day assisting the bioacoustics crew collecting Sim cards from audio recorders from kīpuka forest patches to assess variation in bird vocals by localized community divergence

2024

September

• Aly moves back to the University of Maine Orono to begin her PhD in the Record Lab