Our Team

GIS Professional, Project Manager, Environmental Scientist

Experience= 25 years

Experience Summary:

After working for 10 years as an ecologist and a GIS professional for both private consulting firms and the Bureau of Reclamation, Mr. Cogan founded Cogan Technology, Inc (CTI) in 2005. CTI specializes in providing professional geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, and ecological services. During the course of his career, Mr. Cogan has proven to be a leader in vegetation mapping and has successfully worked on and completed over 50 NPS NVIP projects, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service NWR vegetation mapping projects, and mapping for other federal and state agencies. Mr. Cogan has extensive experience working on all aspects of vegetation mapping and specializes in GIS spatial database creation. Mr. Cogan uses a combination of extensive ground-truthing, manual digitizing, and image automation techniques to create highly detailed and accurate vegetation spatial products. He has also been at the forefront of testing and incorporating new mapping technologies for vegetation signature development, classification, and delineation. Mr. Cogan has worked in the past on NVIP projects at Great Sand Dunes, Lassen Volcanic, and Grand Canyon National Parks evaluating and comparing eCognition segmentation, Image Analyst, and other automated mapping software.

Owner of Coast to Coast Botany and Ecology

Experience Summary:

Mr. Lea has provided training, oversight, and advice to vegetation sampling field methods to about 60 field projects to classify and map vegetation in 270 National Park units using the U.S. National Vegetation Classification Standard (USNVC). Chris has served as National Park Service representative on Vegetation Subcommittee of Federal Geographic Data Committee and contributed to the revised (2008) National Vegetation Classification standard and has written new national guidelines on vegetation classification and a new technical manual for accuracy assessment procedures. Chris has served as program manager for terrestrial vegetation/botany and estuarine ecology programs and developed and implemented programs for vegetation monitoring, ungulate herbivory monitoring, invasive alien plant control, endangered species recovery, water quality monitoring, seagrass monitoring, floristic inventories, research management, and herbarium management. Chris has conducted extensive USNVC statistical analyses and wrote reports for monitoring and management programs.