About Me
Hello, I am Kiki Takeuchi!
I am currently an Environmental Science B.S. Undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara. My interests lie in marine ecology, food security, and GIS applications to conservation issues. I recently conducted research abroad as a student in Thailand and Indonesia, studying the coral reefs and marine ecosystems in these regions. During this program, I gained experience in hands-on skills necessary for conservation work, including GPS reading, transects, site comparisons through photography, species identification, and research paper writing.
One of the Coral Site Replications we made.
I aim to apply skills in GIS to conservation issues including marine conservation, climate change, and forestry to name a few. I am proficient in R Language and am able to utilize R and R Markdown to produce visually appealing web pages addressing different projects and issues. My skills in R include vector and raster data manipulation, as well as the creation of tables and meaningful plots and maps. I am also able to utilize data from multiple public sources, including Open Street Map, manipulate coordinate systems, create tesselations, stack images, and produce interactive maps.
I am also proficient in ArcGis and have utilized this program to address the issue of energy consumption and renewable resources. My group project specifically targeted the plant, Jatropha Curcas, as a source for renewable energy. We targeted the region of Nicaragua, where the plant is known to grow, and mapped different layers including temperature, rainfall, as well as ecological and protected regions, to produce a final suitability layer for growing Jatropha Curcas.
A link to our suitability assessment in ArcGis Storymaps can be found here.
Some of my goals include backpacking Vietnam and Japan, opening up a sustainable cafe, and surfing around the world. Another goal is to apply GIS skills to spacially mapping how coffee-growing regions are projected to respond to climate changes.