Karis Tenneson

Director of the Environmental Mapping Domain
Spatial Informatics Group

Karis Tenneson, PhD, is Director of the Environmental Mapping Team at Spatial Informatics Group. She has broad expertise in ecology, statistics, natural resources management, remote sensing, and GIS. She specializes in developing tools to monitor land use and land cover dynamics, monitoring ecosystem services, and scenario planning. Karis has also developed methods that help generate greenhouse gas inventories and activity data for REDD+ more efficiently. These efforts include the development of OpenForis applications, including Collect Earth Online (an open-source platform for viewing and interpreting satellite imagery) and tools within SEPAL (an open-source platform from FAO that helps countries use satellite data to monitor forests and land use). Recent projects include cloud-based remote-sensing research and monitoring efforts with the Mekong and Amazonia hubs of SERVIR, a joint project of NASA and USAID that helps developing countries use information from Earth-observing satellites and geospatial technologies.