Stephen Conklin

Research Collaborator, GCE-SCIPE at UMCES

Mapping change, from a single riverbed to an entire biodiversity hotspot.

Geospatial analyst, cartographer and developer. Visualizing spatial data as maps and web apps. Building remote sensing workflows and research tools for satellite, aerial and drone imagery.

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Stephen Conklin, smiling, on the rim of the Grand Canyon at sunset

What I do

Remote sensing pipelines

Landsat, Sentinel-2, HLS, NAIP and beyond, from download to analysis-ready products, reproducible and documented.

Web maps & dashboards

Interactive maps and dashboards for exploring and sharing data.

Maps & cartography

Maps for print and screen, from wildfires and earthquakes to landscapes and change.

GIS plugins & automation

QGIS plugins and processing tools that turn many manual steps into one.

Featured Research · NASA BioSCape

From satellite data to research model inputs

As a Research Collaborator with the National Science Foundation–funded GCE-SCIPE team at UMCES, working with Associate Research Scientist G. Burch Fisher, I turned a decade of NASA satellite imagery into phenology data for BioSCape, a NASA-funded US–South Africa biodiversity project in one of the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots.

More about this project →
  1. NDVI temporal mean mosaic of the Greater Cape Floristic Region
    01

    Satellites see the Cape

    A decade of NASA Harmonized Landsat & Sentinel-2 imagery, every few days, at 30 m.

    HLS Vegetation Index Pipeline →
  2. Map of valid observation counts per pixel across the BioSCape study area
    02

    Clouds out, every look counted

    My pipeline masks clouds and shadows and tracks how many clear views each pixel gets.

    HLS Vegetation Index Pipeline →
  3. NDVI phenology scatter for one pixel, 2016 to 2025, with the fitted seasonal curve
    03

    Each pixel’s seasonal rhythm

    Ten years of observations become one smoothed curve: green-up, peak, senescence.

    VI Phenology →
  4. The BioSCape Phenology Explorer with all flight boxes across the Cape and one pixel’s ten-year NDVI time series
    04

    Researchers explore it

    The BioSCape Phenology Explorer: pick a region, click any pixel, see its phenology.

    BioSCape Phenology Explorer →

The deliverables: NetCDF datacubes of time-series phenology for every 30 m pixel, used as model inputs for the BioSCape project, and the BioSCape Phenology Explorer, a dashboard that lets scientists visually explore and navigate the project’s regions and metrics.

  • NASA HLS v2.0
  • Python · xarray · Dask
  • CF-1.8 NetCDF
  • Zarr
  • Plotly Dash
  • NSF Jetstream2

Select projects

Post-fire false-color satellite image of the 2025 Dragon Bravo Fire on the Grand Canyon's North Rim: the burn scar in red-brown against green forest, with the burned area outlinedGIS plugin

Wildfire Analysis Toolkit

Fire perimeter in, burn-severity map and report out in about two minutes — validated against MTBS.

3D view of the Dolores River survey reach with erosion in red and deposition in blue draped over the drone imageryWeb map

Dolores River Geomorphic Change Detection

Centimeter drone surveys of a flood, explorable in 3D in any browser.

The Grand Canyon around Bright Angel Creek as stacked paper terrain: layered slabs from red rock at the Colorado River up to green forest on the North RimGIS plugin · Cartography

QGIS Stacked Terrain Builder

Turns any elevation model into layered, paper-cut terrain art, natively in QGIS.

See all projects →How I work →

Cartography

Wildfires, earthquakes and landscapes, designed to be read at a glance.

View the map gallery →
Map of the 2025 Dragon Bravo Fire showing burn severity across Grand Canyon National Park and the Bright Angel Creek watershed, with photos, a severity chart and before-and-after satellite imagesDragon Bravo Fire · Grand Canyon National Park & Kaibab National Forest, 2025Shaded-relief elevation map of the confluence of the Colorado and Dirty Devil Rivers at the head of Lake Powell, southeast Utah, with the rivers cutting through exposed reservoir sedimentConfluence of the Colorado and Dirty Devil Rivers · Southeast Utah, 2026Map of the March 2025 Mandalay, Myanmar earthquake showing shaking intensity, affected cities, building damage insets, and landslide and liquefaction likelihoodMandalay, Myanmar Earthquake · Magnitude 7.7–7.9, March 28, 2025

About

Based in Durango, Colorado, I’m a Research Collaborator with the National Science Foundation–funded GCE-SCIPE team at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Most recently, in collaboration with Associate Research Scientist G. Burch Fisher, I’ve built remote sensing tools and a dashboard for BioSCape, a NASA-funded biodiversity project in South Africa. Before GIS I spent over two decades building web and data systems and worked as a field technician in the San Juan Mountains.

Full background & CV →

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