David Schmidt is a Wildfire Modeler and Analyst at Spatial Informatics Group. He is a fire ecologist specializing in modeling fire behavior, fuels, and smoke emissions.

Dave has worked on a variety of fire ecology and carbon-related projects. He has expertise in fire behavior modeling, forest dynamics modeling, and data analysis using GIS, non-spatial databases, and other specialized software. Before joining SIG, Dave was a fire ecologist with the Nature Conservancy based at UC Davis, where he worked with US Forest Service ecologists on GIS analysis, contributed to vegetation and fire modeling projects across the state, and did extensive fieldwork collecting data in burned and unburned landscapes. He has spent four summers working on wildfire crews, including one season with the Chena Hotshots of the National Interagency Fire Center.

Dave holds a master’s in Geography (with a minor in plant ecology) from Pennsylvania State University and a bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University.