Johnny Siren
Evidence in the terrain.
Navy veteran, wildland firefighter, geospatial science student at UCCS. Building an environmental consulting practice for land managers who need data they can act on.
38.8339°N, 104.8214°W — Colorado Springs, CO156.3319°W
Roots
My grandparents took a property on Maui with no utilities and no roads and built an off-grid homestead — rain catchment, compost heaps, banana rows, papaya rows. Nobody called it sustainable development. It was just how the land worked when you paid attention to it and kept showing up.
157.9597°W
U.S. Navy
CTT1(SW/IDW) — Cryptologic Technician Technical. Nearly nine years active duty. Three deployments on USS Chung-Hoon out of Pearl Harbor, then shore duty with CTF 69 at NSA Naples supporting 6th Fleet. Reading data off instruments and making it useful — the same work I do now, different sensors.
105.0372°W
Wildland Fire
Two seasons on hand crews and engines. Six fires across three states, including the Spring Creek Fire — 108,000 acres across Huerfano and Costilla counties. Finished as a fire information officer with BLM Nevada.
104.8214°W
Now
Back on the West Side where I grew up. B.A. Geography at UCCS with a GIS concentration. A quarter-acre property where I grow food, keep chickens, and test every pipeline I build. Ten Team Rubicon deployments, including Operations Chief during the 2021 Colorado wind storm response.
Land managers need precise, current data about their terrain. Most of them are working from outdated surveys or coarse satellite passes. The gap between what they know and what the land is doing costs them money, compliance, and time. I'm building a practice to close that gap.
- Ground truth first — Everything I build gets tested on my own quarter acre before it goes anywhere else. Strawberries, leafy greens, chickens, and every sensor I can point at the soil.
- Sensor to data — Multispectral imagery, NDVI, spectral signatures, photogrammetry. The same discipline I learned reading instruments in the Navy, applied to landscapes.
- Data to decision — Vegetation classification, change detection, drainage modeling, burn severity assessment. Outputs calibrated to the decisions the client actually needs to make.
- Scale up — If my system can tell a carrot from a weed at plant level on a quarter acre, the same pipeline identifies cheatgrass on federal land or monitors regen after a fire.
All of it was the same thing at different scales — reading data off a sensor or a landscape and turning it into something someone could act on. My grandparents' homestead, the Navy, wildland fire, and now GIS. This isn't a new direction for me. It's the through-line of everything I've done since I came home.
GIS & Spatial Analysis
QGIS, ArcGIS, spatial data pipelines, vegetation classification, land cover mapping
Remote Sensing
Multispectral imagery, NDVI, spectral signatures, change detection, burn severity assessment
Photogrammetry
Orthomosaics, digital elevation models, centimeter-resolution terrain mapping (WebODM, Agisoft)
Fire & Land Management
Two seasons on crews, BLM fire information. Post-fire recovery monitoring, invasive species mapping
Data Engineering
Python, PostgreSQL, automated analysis pipelines, Linux infrastructure, sensor data integration
Technical Communication
Federal press releases (BLM), fire information briefings, geospatial data visualization, field reporting
Let's talk about your terrain.
Whether you need geospatial work done, or you knew me in another life — Maui, Pearl Harbor, Naples, a fireline, Team Rubicon, the West Side — this is how you find me now.