Kelly Easterday is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the use of a historical dataset, the Wieslander Vegetation Type Mapping project, to understand how fire and management are altering the distribution, structure, and composition of forests in California. 

She comes from a strong background in GIS: since entering graduate school, she has been on a continual journey to expand her geospatial toolset to include QGIS, ENVI, R, Python, and most recently Google Earth Engine. She regularly helps with GIF and IGIS workshops, and is the graduate student instructor for Geographic Information Systems for Environmental Science and Management.