Christine Rollinson
Senior Scientist, Forest Ecology at The Morton Arboretum
Lisle, Illinois, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolChristine Rollinson is a senior forest ecologist with 11 years of experience studying how climate and other global-change drivers structure plant communities across time and space. At The Morton Arboretum she advances empirical and modeling synthesis—linking observations, experiments, and process-based models—to diagnose past and project future forest dynamics. Her work spans statistical and mechanistic approaches and includes hands-on contributions to open-source ecological tooling, notably improving allometry modules in the widely used PEcAn bioinformatics toolbox. Trained with a Ph.D. in Ecology from Penn State, she combines rigorous field data synthesis with model development to produce actionable insights for forest management and conservation. Colleagues value her ability to translate complex datasets into robust, scalable models that reveal subtle climate-driven shifts in forest composition.
11 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Ecology, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Ecology at Penn State UniversityBachelor of Arts (BA), Biology, Environmental Studies, Bachelor of Arts (BA), Biology, Environmental Studies at Oberlin College
English, Spanish
Github Skills (6)
bayesian10
eco10
ecos10
ecosystem10
r10
data-science9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
PecanProject/pecan
Mar 2015 - Nov 2020
The Predictive Ecosystem Analyzer (PEcAn) is an integrated ecological bioinformatics toolbox.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:99 commits, 23 PRs, 1 branch in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Christine primarily contributed to the allometry module, adding and modifying equations within the R codebase. Their work involved implementing new equation forms for allometry calculations and refining existing ones. They also addressed issues related to data handling, such as dropping equations based on negative slopes and incorporating changes related to DBH conditions. Additionally, the user integrated and maintained external data sources used in the models.
forecastingplantspecanbioinformaticscyberinfrastructure
PalEON-Project/modeling_met_ensemble
Mar 2015 - Nov 2020
Contributions:314 commits, 3 PRs, 237 pushes in 5 years 8 months
assimilationdownscaledmetensembleuncertainty-analysis
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