AWS Public Sector Blog
Author: Lori Scott
Lori Scott serves as NatureServe's chief information officer (CIO) and vice president for products. She oversees NatureServe’s technology team, with a portfolio that includes software product development and user support for mission critical enterprise information management and delivery systems. Since joining NatureServe in 2000, Lori has led the successful transformation of the organization’s core biodiversity data platform Biotics 5 and its public information delivery platform NatureServe Explorer. Lori’s team supports NatureServe’s Network of Natural Heritage Programs with implementation of sophisticated online tools to automate environmental review and to manage and direct treatment for invasive species in their jurisdictions. Her team was recognized with the IDG CIO 100 Award in 2016 and the Computerworld Premier 100 Technology Leaders Award in 2017.
Promoting biodiversity conservation with open data and the cloud
Working with a network of 100 biodiversity information centers and 1,000 conservation scientists, NatureServe identifies and understands the most important places to prevent species extinction and ecosystem loss. They provide land use decision-makers in federal and state agencies, industry, academics, and nonprofits with information to meet both regulatory and biodiversity conservation needs. NatureServe and its network collect and maintain data on the conservation status and location of threatened and endangered species, developed over decades of field data collection. But these data have been underutilized in environmental review decision-making processes due to challenges surrounding awareness, access, and reliable or seamless integration with other systems. To address these challenges, they developed an online spatially explicit tool on AWS.