Levi Sweet-Breu

Levi is a PhD student in the McManamay Lab. After graduating from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville with a B.S. in Geology & Environmental Studies in 2020, Levi worked for Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) under Dr. Melissa Allen-Dumas. Starting as an intern before transitioning to subcontracting through Cadre5, LLC, he studied the effect of building morphology on the urban microclimate. He helped develop an open-source Python package that uses building footprint and height data to calculate 132 morphological parameters and outputs data ingestible by the Weather Research and Forecasting model.

            Levi considers himself a geospatial scientist with a diverse technical skillset who studies human-environmental interactions across different scales and disciplines. While at Baylor, he has worked with the IM3, ICoM, and COMPASS teams to project land use/land cover change at high (30 – 150m) resolutions on a regional scale. He has also been involved in quantifying the protection of streams afforded by catchment management for every stream segment in the conterminous US. In addition, Levi is currently working with the USGS to valuate the ecosystem services provided by tree canopy within US cities. He is interested in bridging all of these seemingly disparate projects to understand the current and future state of freshwater habitat conservation within the US.

            Levi has experience in geospatial analysis (ArcGIS), code development for a wide array of uses (Python, Rstudio), and various supporting computational tools and environments (Linux, NCO, parallel computing). Please reach out if you’re interested in learning more about him or his work!