Meet breece

It all began with love of the outdoors and a passion for making a difference…

I love North Carolina but I yearned to get back out to New Mexico for the vistas, the wide open spaces, the culture, art and chile. While teaching a GIS and scenario planning class in Santa Fe, I met The Trust for Public Land for the first time – an organization with the mission of “land for people” – and I knew I found and organization where I could match my passion for the outdoors with a career in GIS, research and planning to save the places we love. After 18 years of leading an amazing team of innovative and creative conservation and park GIS professionals, I decided to expand my skills and expertise to help solve conservation and park issues globally. Currently I am co-building the Center for Geospatial Solutions at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. I’m excited to help organizations and companies, big and small, to harness the power of maps and spatial analysis to protect, restore and take care of our lands and waters.

I’ve been working on my first book for almost a year and a half and it’s been a rewarding experience. I hope you will enjoy reading it and that it will provide insights and inspiration into how GIS and maps can be used to save our planet.

My inspiration?

My true inspiration is the outdoors, nature and wildlife. I love exploring off-the-beaten path places. I particularly love to respectfully visit Ancestral Puebloan sites in the southwest. I remember the first time I saw pottery sherds in the wilderness. I was hiking cross country in Northern New Mexico and sat down to take a break. I looked around and scattered at my feet were beautiful ancient black-on-white broken pottery pieces. It took my breath away. That ignited my passion to learn more about the people who lived here for tens of thousands of years, their ancestors who live in these places now, and sparked a resolve to protect these places and the culture and history they carry on.

I am also inspired by people doing amazing work to save places, cultures, habitats and species. Jane Goodall is one of those people. Her pioneering research on chimpanzees and now her use of GIS to save and restore chimp habitats is so important. Sylvia Earle’s groundbreaking work as the first female marine scientist for NOAA and now creating marine protected areas around the globe. I read a lot and am inspired by authors like Terry Tempest Williams, Craig Childs, Amy Irvine, Alice Walker, Leslie Marmon Silko, and poets like Mary Oliver and my friend Anne Haven McDonnell. Wild places, snorkeling, kayaking, music, reading and writing inspire me and energize me to do the work that must be done to save the places we love.

30 X 30 AND The future of conservation

We are at a critical juncture where we must protect 30 percent of our earth's lands and waters by 2030 and half of earth by 2050 in order to avert catastrophic biodiversity loss and climate collapse. This is a huge challenge that requires us to increase the pace and scale of land protection exponentially. GIS is the only tool to help us understand what 30 and 50 percent of lands and waters must be protected and provides the platform to connect all of our efforts globally. We can’t be successful without data, science, and geospatial technologies.

GIS is powerful mapping software that helps us understand and solve issues through the lens of place and location. It helps us make data and maps accessible through open data portals and easy to configure applications. The platform supports collaboration and inclusiveness through powerful community engagement, analysis, visualization, and storytelling tools that inform equitable strategy and policy changes. The innovative use of data, GIS, and science will help us address the challenging social, racial, and environmental issues we must face with urgency.

GIS is a part of almost everything we touch, interact with or experience in our lives. Its use has become pervasive throughout the world. Whether it’s being used behind the scenes to monitor renewable energy use, detect breaks in natural gas pipes in cities, route FedEx to deliver your packages or prevent poachers from killing endangered species, the uses are endless.

It’s become more than a mapping platform, it’s used for storytelling, community engagement, citizen science, real-time earth observations, and geodesigning the places we want to live in that support our mental, social and physical health.

We can now “mash-up” geospatial data and technologies to do things I couldn’t even imagine possible years ago. For example, anonymized mobility data is used to understand traffic flows through national parks, machine learning can help public land managers detect types of invasive species and eradicate them and satellites are capturing pictures of the earth that detect wildfire ignition sites and where coral reefs are stressed by climate change. It’s really amazing the power that data and maps offer and I believe that by harnessing these technologies and combining them with our passions and creativity, we can solve the earth’s biggest issues - together.