Bio

Thomas uses geospatial analytics to understand and forecast ecological change across landscapes. He connects ecological theory with geospatial approaches to map plant species distributions and improve our understanding of terrestrial ecosystem change. Interests include computer vision for biodiversity monitoring, pest and plant risk forecasting, and supporting conservation and environmental decision-making.

Publications

• Continental-scale computer vision models reveal generalizable patterns and pitfalls for urban tree inventories with street-view images , ISPRS Open Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (2026)
• Predicting the spatial distribution and demographics of commercial swine farms in the United States , Preventive Veterinary Medicine (2026)
• Two decades of satellite images reveal the spatial and temporal dynamics of leafy spurge invasion and improve species distribution models , bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (2025)
• Chronosequence of invasion reveals minimal losses of population genomic diversity, niche expansion, and trait divergence in the polyploid, leafy spurge , Evolutionary Applications (2023)
• Deep learning detects invasive plant species across complex landscapes using Worldview‐2 and Planetscope satellite imagery , Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation (2022)
• Improving predictions of range expansion for invasive species using joint species distribution models and surrogate co‐occurring species , Journal of Biogeography (2021)
• Predicting range expansion of invasive species: Pitfalls and best practices for obtaining biologically realistic projections , Diversity and Distributions (2020)
• Electronic Supplementary Materials for Species distribution models throughout the invasion history of Palmer amaranth predict regions at risk of future invasion and reveal challenges with modeling rapidly shifting geographic ranges , (2019)
• Species distribution models throughout the invasion history of Palmer amaranth predict regions at risk of future invasion and reveal challenges with modeling rapidly shifting geographic ranges , Scientific Reports (2019)
• Species Distribution Models and Joint Species Distribution Models of Nine Invasive Species in North America , University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy (University of Minnesota) (2017)