USDA Forest Service Western Wildlands Environmental Threat Assessment Center
Charlie Schrader-Patton is a Senior Geospatial Analyst and Application Developer with RedCastle Resources, Inc., an on-site contracting group for the USDA Forest Service Geospatial Technology Applications Center (GTAC), a position he has held since 1998. For 10 years, Charlie supported technology development for forest health monitoring, specifically in the design and implementation of a digital data collection system for forest health aerial surveys. Since 2008, he has been developing applications and supporting geospatial technology activities for the USDA Forest Service Western Wildlands Environmental Threat Assessment Center (WWETAC), a multi-disciplinary group of scientists dedicated to assessing impacts to wildlands and working with partners in research and management to develop solutions that help reduce negative effects of these threats and sustain ecosystem services.
Early WWETAC projects include developing applications to extract near-real-time rainfall data from NASA TRMM for incorporation into a smoke dispersion model, building a fire weather mapping application using web feature services, creating geospatial layers addressing national scale wildfire risk in collaboration with fire specialists, and building and maintaining web maps covering the interaction of multiple wildland threats, restoration ecology, and CONUS wide, weekly land surface phenology. More recently (2016-Present) he has been conducting research on spatial modeling of shrubland biomass in southern California – collecting and analyzing available plot data and predictor variable surfaces, building models using machine learning algorithms and validating results. This work is being undertaken in collaboration with a cadre of academic and agency researchers and resource managers. Charlie has been instrumental in the development of a web-based tool addressing the fire impacts on ecosystem services across southern California. Additionally, he is working with tree ecophysiologists on using remote sensing to detect tree drought stress; this work has involved organizing and supervising field campaigns to collect airborne UAS imagery, tree sapflow data, and tree branch samples. 25 years of experience have given him sound working knowledge of languages and systems such as AML, Avenue, Visual Basic, VB.Net, Python, R, Javascript, Google Earth Engine, and the ESRI product suite.
Prior to his position with RedCastle Resources, Charlie held several positions with the USDA Forest Service, including Wildlife Biologist, Timber Sale Technician and NEPA Analyst. He received a B.A. in Biology from Lewis and Clark College (1985) and an M.S. in Forest Resource Conservation from the University of Montana (1996). Since 2000, he and his family have lived in Bend, OR.