A shared set of questions connects my work across border studies, biometeorology, landscape ecology, and spatial science.
Although these projects span different substantive areas, they share a common concern with how environmental conditions, infrastructure, and spatial organization alter movement, exposure, accessibility, and survival. I use spatial analysis, environmental and physiological modeling, machine learning, remote sensing, movement analysis, and counter-forensic methods to study these processes across human and ecological systems.
Rather than separating the work into disciplinary silos, these questions describe the common analytical concerns that run through the research.
Terrain, weather, radiation, vegetation, water availability, and other environmental conditions affect both the feasibility and physiological cost of movement. I examine these relationships across people moving through border landscapes, wildlife navigating fragmented habitat, and populations experiencing extreme heat.
Infrastructure can redirect movement, alter accessibility, fragment landscapes, and redistribute environmental exposure. My work examines these effects in relation to border surveillance and barriers, energy development, transportation systems, land-use change, and heat-response infrastructure.
Many of the processes I study are only partly observed. Movement may be undocumented, mortality records may have uncertain timing, wildlife trajectories are sparsely sampled, and environmental hazards vary continuously through space and time. Spatial methods provide ways to reconstruct and test these processes from incomplete evidence.
These project areas overlap by design. Each draws on related questions about environmental exposure, movement, infrastructure, and spatial inference.
How does environmental exposure become physiologically consequential during movement?
I develop spatially explicit human heat-balance approaches that incorporate meteorological conditions, radiation, physical exertion, terrain, and exposure duration. This work moves beyond ambient temperature alone to examine the physiological consequences of moving through heterogeneous environments.
Published applications include heat-related illness and mortality in the Arizona borderlands, thermoregulation during irregular migration, and spatial measures of physiological heat exposure.
How do enforcement systems alter where people move and the hazards they encounter?
My border research examines surveillance, barriers, access restrictions, and enforcement practices as spatial systems that reorganize mobility. Rather than treating environmental hazards as independent of policy, this work considers how enforcement changes route choice, access, exposure, and the geography of mortality and disappearance.
Related counter-forensic collaborations extend these questions beyond the U.S.–Mexico border to other militarized border landscapes.
How do terrain and infrastructure change the energetic cost and connectivity of animal movement?
I use GPS data, terrain models, remote sensing, and energetic cost-distance approaches to model wildlife movement through heterogeneous landscapes. This work examines how terrain, infrastructure, energy development, border barriers, and water access influence movement costs and landscape connectivity.
Species studied include pronghorn, mule deer, jaguar, Texas tortoise, and other terrestrial wildlife.
How does extreme heat interact with the built environment and uneven access to protective resources?
My climate-health research connects meteorological and physiological exposure with urban form, vulnerability, and access to cooling. This includes spatial modeling of human heat exposure and collaborative work on the accessibility and placement of cooling resources.
The goal is to connect atmospheric and physiological information to public-health and planning questions in ways that are spatially explicit and actionable.
Methods vary by problem, but the research repeatedly combines environmental process models with spatial evidence and movement or accessibility analysis.
Human heat balance · energetics · meteorological exposure
Machine learning · spatiotemporal modeling · inference from incomplete observations
Cost distance · connectivity · routing · location-allocation
Remote sensing · terrain analysis · land-cover characterization
Spatial reconstruction · mortality and disappearance analysis · infrastructure analysis
Ongoing work extends these themes while methodological details, hypotheses, datasets, and preliminary results remain reserved for formal scholarly dissemination.
Physiologically based approaches to understanding exposure under contemporary and changing climate conditions.
Spatial analysis of how environmental conditions and infrastructure shape movement and risk.
Research connecting extreme weather, vulnerability, and access to protective resources.
Development and application of computational approaches for studying processes that are difficult to observe directly.
Specific details of ongoing studies are added as projects reach public presentation, preprint, report, or publication stages.