Quantitative Ecologist

​2026

​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