Quinn Asena
Data Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. Mapping wildfire risk at continental scale with deep learning, and simulating boreal forest dynamics under climate change.
Data Scientist, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Investigating ecological dynamics in the past, present and future: what drives ecosystems to change, and whether we can see it coming.
Current work
Boreal forests and wildfire risk
Process-based landscape simulations of boreal North
America under multiple climate scenarios, and mapping wildfire risk at continental
scale with deep learning. The clip shows Alaska's fire record, 1980 to 2020.
More about this work →
Selected publications
A state-space model for ecological count data
Estimating species interactions and driver–species
relationships from multinomial time series.
Information loss in palaeoecological data
Which sources of uncertainty matter most, and where
sampling effort is best spent.
Is the past recoverable from the data?
A virtual ecology approach to assessing uncertainty in palaeo-records.
multinomialTS
multinomialTS
State-space modelling of multinomially distributed
data. Estimate how environmental drivers relate to each taxon, and how taxa
interact, directly from count data such as fossil pollen.
Documentation, install, paper, talk and workshop →
Explore
Research
Publications, with plain-language summaries of what
they found.
Talks
Slides, recordings, and a full record of conference
presentations.
Teaching
Open, hands-on workshop materials and lecture
resources.
Software
multinomialTS and other R packages, plus
interactive apps for teaching modelling.