Dr Mitchell Lyons

Snapshot: Senior Research Fellow | Dr Mitchell Lyons is a geospatial data scientist and earth observation researcher working at the interface of earth observation, AI, data infrastructure, ecosystem accounting, and environmental policy. His work turns remote sensing, field, and administrative data into repeatable methods, open tools, and decision-ready indicators for biodiversity monitoring, ocean accounting, natural capital assessment, and sustainable development.

Full bio: I am a Senior Research Fellow at the UNSW Centre for Sustainable Development Reform. My research focuses on building the technical foundations for environmental intelligence: scalable earth observation workflows, machine learning methods, cloud-native spatial data infrastructure, and environmental-economic accounts that help governments and partners measure, manage, and invest in nature.

My work spans marine, coastal, and terrestrial systems, with particular expertise in coral reefs, seagrass, mangroves, saltmarsh, tidal flats, vegetation, biodiversity monitoring, and ecosystem services. I have led and contributed to major national and global mapping initiatives, including the Allen Coral Atlas, Global intertidal and seagrass mapping, Australia's National Ocean Accounts, national and regional blue carbon mapping, Australia-wide coastal ecosystem mapping, and the Global Ocean Accounts Partnership's Spatial Data Framework. Across these projects, my emphasis is on methods that are transparent, reproducible, flexible, and operationally useful.

I work closely with government agencies, international organisations, NGOs, universities, and private-sector partners to move research into practice. I lead technical programs supporting countries to develop ocean accounts aligned with the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting and broader sustainable ocean development priorities. This includes country-level implementations across the Indo-Pacific, the Caribbean, and beyond, combining methodological development, capacity building, and the underlying spatial data infrastructure that makes ocean accounting practical at national scale. My current systems work centres on an open source Spatial Data Framework, which is a cloud-native platform that ingests heterogeneous spatial data, runs reproducible processing pipelines, tracks full provenance ("data passports"), calculates indicators, and feeds dashboards, reports, and APIs from a single governed source.

Technically, I work across remote sensing, spatial statistics, machine learning, cloud-native geospatial systems, and open-source software. I develop and lead projects that use workflows across R, Python, JavaScript, Google Earth Engine, and Open Data Cube approaches, and deploy across all main environments (AWS, Google, Microsoft, Docker/Kubernetes, Dask, PostGIS, STAC) via most common full stack builds (e.g. Node, React, Next). My current software and data infrastructure work includes tools for provenance-aware spatial processing, dashboard and report generation, and reusable country-scale ocean accounting deployments.

I have over 15 years of experience across academia, government-facing applied research, and international technical partnerships. I have >70 peer-reviewed publications, delivered training and technical workshops in multiple countries, and supervised and mentored students and early-career researchers. I am a long-term member of the Joint Remote Sensing Research Program and maintain a strong commitment to open science, practical knowledge transfer, and stakeholder-led implementation.

I am based in Bredbo, NSW, where my partner and I run a small farm, with two young kids. I'm a volunteer firefighter with the RFS, am actively involved in our local school, and if there's any left over time I love to swim (ocean or river!) and play music.

Affiliations: I'm in the Centre for Sustainable Development Reform and the Global Ocean Accounts Partnership. I collaborate closely with the Centre for Ecosystem Science and I'm also a long time member of the Joint Remote Sensing Research Program

Links: See my Google Scholar profile (http://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=9PnIKHYAAAAJ) for papers, and let me know if there's any you can't get. For code + software see my GitHub pages (https://github.com/mitchest/; https://github.com/SustainableDevelopmentReform)

Contact: email: mitchell.lyons@unsw.edu.au | LinkedIn