Beth Tellman
Co-founder and advisor
Beth seeks to address the causes and consequences of global environmental change in vulnerable populations, with a focus on water access risk, flooding, and land use change. Beth uses a multi- and transdisciplinary approach to “socialize the pixel” or understand the social processes that cause environmental changes captured in pixels from satellite images in order to improve human well-being. She has extensive experience in artificial intelligence and its applications for environmental justice.
Her field studies have focused on Mexico and Central America. Beth's work in Mexico has been on issues of informal urbanization in Mexico City in collaboration with the National Laboratory of Sustainability Sciences (UNAM Institute of Ecology); she also developed a study with the NGO Isla Urbana and Oxfam to propose a program to install 100,000 rainwater harvesting systems in Mexico City. In Central America, she studied the links between drug trafficking and deforestation.
The root of her research questions and inspiration for transdisciplinary research comes from her experience in El Salvador over four years, where she co-founded a community NGO to build resilience to landslides and floods in the Santiago Texacuangos area after Hurricane Ida in 2009. Academically, she trained in human-environmental geography and studied for her PhD in geography at Arizona State University, USA.
She is co-founder and Head of Science at Floodbase, a company that uses remote sensing and machine learning to create flood maps for parametric insurance systems. She is currently a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
To learn more about her publications and projects: https://beth-tellman.github.io/.
