Jonathan Lefcheck
Scientist Owner at Best Environmental Applied Research
Edgewater, Maryland, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJonathan Lefcheck is a marine ecologist, biodiversity scientist, and biostatistician with 11+ years translating ecological research into actionable coastal conservation and restoration strategies. He has led large multi-partner monitoring networks—most notably coordinating global surveys at the Smithsonian’s Marine Global Earth Observatory—and now balances applied research roles at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and his own consultancy, Best Environmental Applied Research. His expertise spans seagrass ecology, blue carbon dynamics, and a remarkable breadth of habitats from coral and oyster reefs to deep-sea vents, enabling synthesis across scales from microbes to ecosystems. Skilled at partnering with NGOs, agencies, and citizen scientists, he turns complex data into management-ready guidance and restoration tools. An underappreciated strength is his rare combination of field mastery and quantitative rigor, allowing him to both design robust experiments and communicate results that influence policy and on-the-ground practice.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts - BA, Biology, General, Bachelor of Arts - BA, Biology, General at Colby CollegeHigh School Diploma, High School Diploma at Suffield AcademyDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Marine Sciences, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Marine Sciences at William & Mary
Stackoverflow
4,459reputation
495kreached
3answers
42questions
Github Skills (20)
sem10
r10
lavaan10
structural-equation-modeling10
efi7
duplicates6
ggplot6
plot6
regex6
dataframe6
annotations6
driver5
ecology5
r-package4
github-pages4
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
jslefche/sem_book
Nov 2018 - Aug 2021
An Introduction to Structural Equation Modeling
Contributions:70 commits, 98 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 9 months
structural-equation-modelingsempath-analysislatent-variableslavaan
jslefche/piecewiseSEM
Sep 2018 - Dec 2022
Piecewise Structural Equation Modeling in R
Contributions:293 commits, 9 PRs, 754 pushes in 4 years 3 months
rstructural-equation-modelingsem
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.