I'm Julie Padilla (she/her) and I’m currently a data scientist with the USGS Data Science Branch at US Geological Survey. In my role I spend about half of my time working on data science projects and the other half on management and process improvement tasks for the branch.
Examples of my USGS work available on GitHub include:
- lake-temperature-model-prep - This a scipiper modeling data prep repo that has been a long running project in the Data Science Branch. My primary contributions to this pipeline were primarily focused on cleaning and munging raw temperature profile data from project cooperators (here, here, and here are three examples). As part of that work, I also love to find and fix bugs all along the way.
- lake-temperature-missouri-models - This is a small modeling project that was part of the larger body lake temperature modeling work at USGS. This
targets
pipeline creates and calibrates GLM 3.0 models for eight reservoirs in Missouri. I am the primary author on this repo, but I have borrowed heavily from pre-existing code bases (here and here) to speed development. The outputs from this work are publicly available on USGS ScienceBase. - My contribution to the 2023 VizLab Chart Challenge - Each year the USGS VizLab contributes to Chart Challenge a twitter-based data viz challenge that runs in April. The timing was perfect to discuss trends in Great Lakes ice cover which had just wrapped the 2023 season.
Examples of my work under previous affiliations:
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SWMPrExtension - I served as project manager and technical lead on this project, leading a team of two staff. This was my initial entry into working with the National Estuarine Research Reserve System. Working together we defined a series of data analyses and reporting templates that can be used to quickly develop custom annual status reports for each of the 29 reserves in the system. This project is currently maintained by Dr Dave Eslinger.
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SWMPrStorm - I served as project manager and technical lead on this project, leading a team of three staff. This body of work is an outgrowth of the original annual reporting tools that were developed along with the
SWMPrExtension
package. I worked with the Southeast Atlantic NERRs to scope this work, and to develop and to finalize this initial suite of data analyses. This project was "in progress" during my transition over to USGS, so the work was completed by Ben Crary, Amanda Flynn, and Shanna Rucker.
I also have a few projects on code.usgs.gov
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NAWQA Pesticide National Synthesis Project Update - This repo was a test project between the Data Assembly Function and the USGS staff behind the NAWQA Pesticide National Synthesis Project. With this project we wanted to refactor a pre-existing pipeline and give the final plots a style update. We refactored the pipeline using
R
andtargets
which accomplished two things: (1) decreased the number of programming languages from 3 to 1, and (2) removed a dependency on proprietary GIS software and related python libraries. After updating the code, the VizLab took a crack at updating the design aesthetic while considering accessiblity and acknowledging the previous years of design. -
National IWAAs - It's pretty early days for this project, but much of the work related to the National Water Availability Assessment will reside in this repo. I am working with junior data scientists to scope and manage this body of work.
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Data Science Practitioners' Manual - This manual is an outgrowth of the Data Science Practitioners' Meeting - a monthly meeting for data scientists from a variety of USGS branches and Water Science Centers to come together and discuss strategy, programming patterns, and thorny data problems. The manual serves as a central location for documentation related to data science and computing practices. The repo is here and is jointly managed by me and Jesse Ross.
++ You will only have access to these repos if you are a USGS employee on VPN