Tyler Schartel

Tyler Schartel serves as an Associate Research Scientist in Conservation Ecology at the Illinois Natural History Survey, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research integrates computational methods with field ecology to address freshwater conservation and invasive species challenges.

Research interests span:

• Freshwater mussel biodiversity and ecosystem health
• Machine learning applications for species distribution modeling
• Invasive pest risk assessment (vineyard moths, Xylella vectors)
• Protected lands effectiveness for conservation targets

His work emphasizes algorithmic rigor in ecological informatics and climate-driven disease forecasting.

Recent publications reveal strong trends in computational ecology: improving machine learning stability for cross-dataset species-richness modeling (2025), optimizing Maxent background selection for freshwater systems (2024), and developing climate-informed risk frameworks for agricultural pests (2022-2023). Key methodological contributions focus on predictor discriminability metrics and vector tolerance thresholds.