Tim Gilbert / Tucson, Arizona

Apps for ecologists, sports fans & nerds.

I’m an ecologist and data scientist who builds R Shiny apps, databases, scrapers, offline field tools, and unnecessarily ambitious browser experiments. I like making complicated things easier—and a lot more fun—to use.

Start with the fun stuff Apps & systems
EcologistData scientistBuilder of odd little worlds

Field identification / TG-14

Tim Gilbert overlooking the Grand Canyon 36.10° N / 112.11° W FIELD RECORD ACTIVECANIS MODE ACTIVE
SUBJECTTim Gilbert
RANGEMostly Arizona
R SHINY✶PYTHON✶SQL✶CANVAS✶FIELD ECOLOGY✶SPORTS DATA✶OFFLINE-FIRST✶WEIRD SIDE PROJECTS✶

New interactive websites

A Tucson Saturday. A mountain road. A dead spaceship.

Three browser experiments built from scratch with Canvas, sound, scroll choreography, and an unreasonable amount of attention to tiny details.

Tucson stadium glowing at nightScroll + sound

The Long Saturday

One desert day, from first light to kickoff.

Film scrubbing · field-recorded soundscape · four scroll movementsEnter the story ↗
27 Miles to Canada, Mount Lemmon interactive ascentProcedural Canvas

27 Miles to Canada

Drive from saguaros to snow in twenty-seven miles.

Six biotic communities · elevation model · live climate shiftStart the climb ↗
The Orrery procedural solar systemProcedural world

The Orrery

Eleven worlds keep time around one dead ship.

Canvas-baked planets · generative score · shuttle flight · hidden sectorChoose a world ↗

Apps + systems

Then there’s the useful stuff.

Field data, football recruits, small mammals, and movie botany. Different subjects; same habit of turning messy data into something worth exploring.

Vegetation data collection along a field transect
OFFLINE · 12 SAFE
01 / FIELD → DATABASE

EcoPlot Mobile

Offline vegetation data collection, cloud sync, office review, and reports. Built for places where the bars on your phone are mostly decorative.

  • PWA
  • Azure SQL
  • Offline sync
Case study →Live app ↗
Power-4 Girth Index cover for 67-program roster intelligence02 / SPORTS

Power-4 Girth Index

How all 67 ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC programs build football and basketball rosters—with live coverage status, body maps, position DNA, and high-school talent geography.

  • R Shiny
  • Live data
  • Talent maps
Open app ↗
NEON Small Mammal Tracker national map03 / ECOLOGY

Small Mammal Tracker

National trapping records turned into animal histories, home ranges, diversity profiles, and a Hall of Fame for the most-caught little weirdos.

  • R
  • Mapping
  • Ecological stats
Open app ↗
Plants in Movies interactive comparison chart04 / BOTANY?

Plants in Movies

Which state has the flora of Arrakis, Middle-earth, or Isla Nublar? Roughly 250,000 USDA records were apparently the reasonable way to answer that.

  • R Shiny
  • USDA data
  • Chord diagrams
Open app ↗
Everything else I’ve built

A few receipts

Real projects. Real records.

178k+Mammal capture records made navigable
46NEON field sites in one tracker
250k+USDA plant records compared with movie worlds

Under the hood

I do the database, the interface, and the field logic.

I’m happiest when I can understand the weird edge case, model it correctly, and make the finished thing feel obvious.

01

Build the thing

R Shiny apps, progressive web apps, desktop helpers, and framework-free browser experiments.

R · Python · JavaScript · Electron
02

Wire the data

Relational models, offline sync, ETL pipelines, scrapers, and QA/QC that survive real use.

SQL · Azure · SQLite · APIs
03

Know the field

Years of ecological work mean the protocol, the crew, and the no-signal edge case are never afterthoughts.

Vegetation · Wildlife · Spatial data
04

Make it interesting

Maps, charts, motion, sound, and visual systems that reward curiosity instead of flattening it.

Canvas · Plotly · ggplot2 · Audio
Rangeland fieldwork in the American Southwest

Before the code

I learned the data before I learned the stack.

Small-mammal trapping, vegetation surveys, electrofishing, soil work—the field came first. That still shapes every offline workflow, validation rule, and interface decision I make.

Send me the weird one

Got a cursed spreadsheet, a strange dataset, or an app idea nobody else understands?

That is probably more interesting than a normal contact form.

Tell me about itBrowse the code ↗