Lauren Hendricks (she/her) grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, blocks from the Superior Hiking Trail. She has been fortunate to combine her passion for outdoor activities with her interest in maps, spatial data, and ecology into a PhD in geography from the University of Oregon. Along the way she studied environmental science and engineering in Maine and New Hampshire, helped identify potential conservation partnerships as a GIS analyst in Virginia, studied how prairie plants in Oregon might react to future climate change while earning her master’s degree, worked on an atlas of ungulate migration in Wyoming, and spent months living in the rainforest of Borneo to better understand the role of fire in tropical forest over the last 3000 years. She is now based out of Golden, Colorado, where she serves as the GIS Program Manager with the Continental Divide Trail Coalition.