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 to use, and a lot more fun.

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

Compare how all 67 ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC programs build football and basketball rosters: body maps, position profiles, where the high-school talent actually comes from, and whether recruiting strength turns into wins. Yes, the name is intentional.

  • R Shiny
  • Live data
  • Power-4 matchups
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+Capture records traced to individual animals
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 on the small, specific problems, like the offline edit that collided with someone else’s, or the trap tag that got reused. Nobody downstream should ever have to know it happened.

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

I spent years on field crews running vegetation protocols. I know what they ask of a crew, and what it is like to enter it all on a tablet.

Vegetation · Wildlife · Spatial data
04

The fun part

Maps, charts, motion, and sound. A chart you can poke at (tap a bar, see which families drive the score) beats one you just look at.

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

Before the data

I was collecting data for NEON before I wrote any code to handle it.

Small-mammal trapping, vegetation surveys, electrofishing, and soil work. That’s why I build for one thumb in bad lighting, with no signal.

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 ↗