Researcher Spotlight
Sam Stickley
Sam is a PhD candidate working in Jennifer Fraterrigo's landscape ecology lab in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. He earned his B.S. degree from Colorado State University and M.S. degree in Environmental Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University. Sam is interested in prioritizing conservation efforts, and his current research involves the use of geospatial datasets to predict microclimate for use in species distribution modeling of plethodontid salamanders in southern Appalachia.
What influenced your decision to deposit your data in the Illinois Data Bank? Is there anything else you would like to share about the Research Data Service, Illinois Data Bank or your research?
This dataset was developed as a collaborative effort from multiple people, so we were interested in storing our data in one secure place as a long-term backup and we needed to fulfill data storage requirements for publication. Illinois Data Bank was great to work with and very thoroughly checked our data to make sure we did not have any errors before submission which was appreciated.