courtney l king
portfolio
courtney l king
i’m courtney, and i’m a phd student 👩🎓 at michigan technological university! i’m studying the movements and behaviors — including foraging, predator avoidance, and habitat selection — of moose on isle royale. i am interested in how the decisions of moose are impacted by ecological interactions and environmental conditions, and how they in-turn influence the forests in which they reside.
along this journey, i am excited about developing and applying skills in environmental data science! i am particularly interested in image classification and utilizing/improving approaches to better understand the environment (snow, forest structure and composition, forest health, etc.) via remote sensing. i believe that data fusion and other opportunities to interface between fields – such as wildlife biology 🫎, forestry 🌲, and snow science 🏔️ – benefits us all! i am also invested in the fair/care data management principles, and making science more open while also preserving indigenous data sovereignty and protecting sensitive information.
my research is funded in-part by the datasense nsf-nrt program, which will support lots of collaboration and co-learning relevant to the above themes! in the meantime, i’m hoping to improve skills through online learning opportunities including those offered by the esiil lab at cu boulder.
quick snapshots into isle royale:
based on this plot, it doesn’t look like ndvi has changed very much over the past 2+ decades on isle royale! however, I am very interested in accessing and utilizing more spatiotemporally explicit data to understand how – and where – the forest health, snow depth, and other environmental characteristics of isle royale differ, and how that relates to moose movements and behavior.
a sample of other work created during the esiil 2025 data short course:
Annual Climate in Al Jawf Region, Saudi Arabia