Welcome!
I research how data technologies inform environmental governance. New kinds of data-generating sensors and data-synthesizing algorithms are becoming central to everyday life and may prove transformational in policy too. A key challenge for geographers in the coming years is assessing these technologies’ promise to help society solve sustainability issues related to toxic pollution, food security, climate change adaptation, and ecosystem services conservation. This will be done by understanding their human dimensions - their design, use, maintenance, and effects on society - alongside other governance trends such as marketization and metrification. It will involve understanding how these data systems came to be but also experimenting with them towards more just and equitable ends.
My work contributes to the field of political ecology and is supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, SSHRC. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in nature-society geography and methods, including in Guelph’s Master’s of Conservation Leadership program. I am a member of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), where we bring people together to analyze publicly available socio-environmental data and track the portrayal of climate change issues on the web.
Projects
Big data and related data collection tools such as acoustic
sensors; machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms; dashboards and platforms for sharing data – these all constitute “digital conservation.” Digital technologies have the potential to make conservation more holistic, responsive, and participatory. However, we hear a lot about the promises of digital conservation and less about the challenges. Is access to digital conservation democratic? Are outcomes lining up with expectations? In general, what do conservationists actually think about and do with digital tools?
- Urban Political Ecology of Informal Greenspaces - There is a growing movement to create national parks in urban Canada, propelled in part by COVID restrictions in which more people
turned to parks as sources of relaxation and connection. At the same time, it is increasingly recognized that “informal greenspaces” (IGS) from pop-up parks to vacant lots may also provide significant ecosystem service and biodiversity benefits as well as meaningful recreational opportunities. This research project asks, how can we identify these IGS, understand what they mean to people, and assess their relationship with conventional parks? We will: 1) identify and characterize IGS using volunteered geographic information (VGI) from citizen science platforms; 2) compare informal and formal greenspaces in terms of their accessibility and biophysical qualities; 3) contextualize the limitations of the VGI data we utilize. We will test our approach in southern Ontario.
- Situating Data for Environmental Justice – Canada’s National Strategy to Address Environmental Racism requires the federal government to complete a study examining whether racialized, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities are disproportionately exposed to hazards such as toxic pollutants. The study is likely to rely on existing datasets, mapping, and analytical approaches. As such, it may focus only on proving the existence of environmental racism rather than illustrating its mechanisms. Our project will instead demonstrate mechanisms such as the failure of policy to address cumulative effects, showing which communities have dealt with the most toxic substances, the longest, and which are home to industrial facilities habitually non-compliant with environmental health protection laws.
- Environmental Enforcement Watch (EEW) - EEW is a collaborative project engaging with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) database and to: draw large-scale public attention to the lack of environmental enforcement; work with partner organizations, especially marginalized communities, to build data efficacy through mutually beneficial relationships; inform EPA visions of alternative forms of public engagement; prototype community-oriented structures for environmental data, i.e. by congressional district, watershed, and health risks for a community; call attention to the relationship between environmental enforcement, environmental racism, and other interlocking forms of oppression (particularly white supremacy, capitalism, settler-colonialism, heteropatriarchy, etc.)
Recruitment
I am recruiting Master’s and/or PhD students to start in Fall 2026 on the above projects. Prospective students should be interested in conducting interviews, document analysis, survey, and/or statistical and spatial analysis for their research. I can offer training in communication skills - including mapping, data visualization, and public writing - and in the scholarly fields of political ecology and science and technology studies. Students would have the opportunity to collaborate with the Environmental and Data Governance Initiative and other partners. Former graduate students have gone on to work in academia and in the conservation and environmental NGO sectors.
I welcome interested candidates to email me with a brief statement of interest, an unofficial transcript, and a writing/research sample.
I especially encourage applications by individuals from justice-seeking groups and those underrepresented in higher education. The Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at Guelph and I aim to foster welcoming and collaborative spaces that value diversity and wellness. More about the Department:
- Guaranteed funding for all graduate students for the duration of the program
- Comprehensive support for fieldwork and research expenses
- Outstanding faculty dedicated to a collaborative model of graduate education
- Research-intensive, collegial department in one of Canada’s top comprehensive universities
- Spacious campus with modern amenities in a vibrant community
For additional details, please see our website.
Webmapping and other programming projects
Collaborative
- EDGI - Environmental Enforcement Watch - Bringing people together to analyze publicly available data on how environmental protection laws are enforced and complied with (Python-based Jupyer Notebooks)
- EDGI - Website Monitoring - Python-based analysis of changes to US federal environmental agency websites, 2016-2020
- EDGI - New Jersey Drinking Water Justice Tool - A Streamlit based-tool for exploring drinking water justice in New Jersey
- gfw - Jupyter Notebook in R for analyzing Global Fishing Watch data
- HazMatMapper - Collaborative D3.js project for telling stories about the North American hazardous waste trade
- IPCC - Jupyter Notebook in Python for bibliometric analysis of papers cited in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Asssessment Report
- LA_MasterPlan_Analysis - Jupyter Notebook in Python for analyzing the US state of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan
Other
- Angular - a demonstration of using Angular.js for mapping applications
- armchairgeographer - pulls random Flickr images from a specified set of coordinates, maps the area, and displays text randomly selected from a set of social theorists.
- election 2016 - a map of the 2016 US presidential election results
- Exploring ES - an experiment in mapping difference and change in ecosystem services
- Louisiana Land Loss - D3.js visualizations of coastal erosion in the US state of Louisiana
- MyGuelph - Leaflet webmap for participatory mapping Guelph’s new city ward boundaries.
- New Orleans Census Viewer - Angular-based view of US Census information about the city
- New Orleans STR Viewer - Angular-based view of short-term rental licenses in the city
- waste processing scripts - Mostly Python scripts for integrating CSVs related to hazardous waste data
- zipcode - Using Turf.js and Leaflet to map US zipcodes
Selected Papers
Data governance and infrastructure
Environmental governance actors - states, corporations, conservation groups, farmers, and so on - struggle to get the information they want. There’s more and more data out there every day, but it’s often siloed. Even when it’s available, it’s not necessarily relevant and there typically isn’t the time or money to make sense of it. Governing nature, it turns out, means governing data. Who collects environmental data and manages environmental databases, and who pays for it all? These questions tend to crystallize in data infrastructures.
- E. Nost. 2024. Governing AI, governing climate change? Geo: Geography and Environment. Link
- J. Goldstein and E. Nost. 2022. The Nature of Data: Infrastructures, Environments, Politics. University of Nebraska Press. Link
- Nost, E. 2022. ‘The tool didn’t make decisions for us’: metrics and the performance of accountability in environmental governance Science as Culture. Link
- Drakopulos, L., Silver, J., Nost, E., Hawkins, R., and Gray, N. 2022. Making global oceans governance in/visible with Smart Earth: The case of Global Fishing Watch. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. Link
- Nost, E. and E. Colven. 2022. Earth for AI: A Political Ecology of Data-Driven Climate Initiatives. Geoforum. Link
- Nost, E. and J.E. Goldstein. 2021. A political ecology of data. Environment & Planning E: Nature and Space. Link
- Machen, R. and E. Nost. 2021. Thinking algorithmically: The making of hegemonic knowledge in climate governance. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Link
- Nost, E. 2020. Infrastructuring “data-driven” environmental governance in Louisiana’s coastal restoration plan. Environment & Planning E: Nature and Space. Link
- Nost, E. 2019. Climate services for whom? The political economics of contextualizing climate data for Louisiana’s coastal Master Plan. Climatic Change. 157(1): 27-42. Link
- Nost, E. 2015. Performing nature’s value: software and the making of Oregon’s ecosystem services markets. Environment and Planning: A 47 (12): 2573-2590. Link
Digital practice and praxis
Decision-makers increasingly aim for what they call “data-driven” governance. But data doesn’t “drive” as much as it affords. It has to be learned from, through institutions that allow decision-makers to access expertise and communicate their expectations. Who are the users of digital technologies? What can they learn and do with their tools? How can data serve public ends, in and beyond the classroom?
- E. Nost, M. Sullivan, K. Breseman, L. Milanés, and N. Davi. 2025. An Online Interactive Tool for Exploring Water Justice with Undergraduate Students. Pedagogy in Health Promotion. Link
- E. Nost, G. Gehrke, L. Vera, and S. Hansen. 2025. Why the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative is archiving public environmental data. Patterns. Link
- Horgan, L., K. Mok., E. Boetsch, S. Kelly, K. Dickinson, E. Nost, R. Bongiavanni, an S. Wylie. 2023. What Does Chelsea Creek Do for You? A Relational Approach to Environmental Justice Communication. Environmental Justice. Link
- Molloy, M., E. Nost, and M. Bledsoe. 2023. Is adaptation planning effective and for whom? The case of Louisiana’s 2017 Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast. Environmental Hazards. Link
- Steger, C., Hirsh, S., Cosgrove, C., Inman, S., Nost, E., Shinbrot, X., Thorn, J.P.R., Browth, D.G., Gret-Regamey, A., Muller, B., Reid, R.S., Tucker, C., Weibel, B., Klein, J.A. 2021. Linking model design and application for transdisciplinary approaches in social-ecological systems. Global Environmental Change. Link
- Tirrell, C, L. Senier, S. Wylie, C. Alder, G. Poudrier, J. Divalli, M. Beck, E. Nost, R. Brackett, and G. Gehrke. 2020. Learning in Crisis: Training students to monitor and address irresponsible knowledge construction by U.S. federal agencies under Trump. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6. Link
- Walker, D., E. Nost, A. Lemelin, R. Lave, and L. Dillon. 2018. Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together. Geo. Link
- Vincent, K., R. E. Roth, S. A. Moore, Q. Huang, N. Lally, C. M. Sack, E. Nost, and H. Rosenfeld. 2018. Improving spatial decision making using interactive maps: An empirical study on interface complexity and decision complexity in the North American hazardous waste trade. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. Link
- Nost, E., H. Rosenfeld, K. Vincent, S. Moore, and R.E. Roth. 2017. HazMatMapper: An online and interactive geographic visualization tool for exploring transnational flows of hazardous waste and environmental justice. Journal of Maps 13(1): 14-23. Link Shortlisted for Journal of Maps’s 2017 “Best Map” award.
Digital natures
What does nature become when we interact with it via digital tools?
- Nost, E. 2025. Follow the Thing: Digital Natures. Conservation and Society. Link
- A. Luque-Ayala, R. Machen, E. Nost. Digital natures: New ontologies, new politics? Digital Geography and Society. Link
- L Drakopulos, E Nost, R Hawkins, JJ Silver. 2022. A Shark in your Pocket, A Bird in your Hand (Held): The Spectacular and Charismatic Visualisation of Nature in Conservation Apps. Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities. Link
Methods for political ecology
How can political ecologists sharpen or build new methods for understanding environmental governance?
- Nost, E. 2025. Q-method. In The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research R. Lave and S. Lane, eds. OpenBookPublishers.
- Nost, E., G. Gehrke, G. Poudrier, A. Lemelin, M. Beck, and S. Wylie. Visualizing Changes to US Federal Environmental Agency Websites, 2016-2020. 2021. PLoS One. Link
- Ohayon, J., E. Nost, K. Silk, M. Rakoff. 2020. Barriers and opportunities for breast cancer organizations to focus on environmental health and disease prevention: a mixed-methods approach using website analyses, interviews, and focus groups. Environmental Health. Link
- Nost, E., M. Robertson, and R. Lave. 2019. Q-method and the performance of subjectivity: Reflections from a survey of US stream restoration practitioners. Geoforum 105: 23-31. Link
- Moore, S. A., H. Rosenfeld, E. Nost, K. Vincent, and R. E. Roth. 2018. Undermining methodological nationalism: Cosmopolitan analysis and visualization of the North American hazardous waste trade. Environment and Planning A. Link
- Moore, S., R. Roth, H. Rosenfeld, E. Nost, K. Vincent, T. Buckingham, M.R. Arefin. 2017. Undisciplining Environmental Justice Research with Visual Storytelling. Geoforum. Link