Environmental Monitoring & Data Lead — Forest & Reserves

Nelson City Council; Nelson; On-site; NZD 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Wellbeing leave

Health insurance

Professional development

Employee benefits

Leave provisions

Job summary

Nelson City Council is recruiting for a Forest Monitoring and Data Specialist who will design and run environmental monitoring, spatial data workflows and reporting systems across forests and hill country reserves. The role blends field science with GIS, UAV surveys and remote sensing to track environmental changes.

You will lead data pipelines and dashboards, apply advanced statistics, and produce governance and funding reports for senior leaders and regulators. A NZ driver license is required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor-level or higher qualification in environmental science or related field.
• Experience designing environmental monitoring and evaluation systems.
• Strong GIS, remote sensing, and UAV experience.
• Strong statistical and scripting skills (R, Python).
• Experience building dashboards and data visualisation tools.
• Experience in reporting to regulators or funders.
• Full NZ driver license.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement environmental monitoring frameworks including field and UAV surveys.
• Own and operate spatial data infrastructure, GIS workflows and remote sensing processes.
• Apply statistical methods to identify trends and inform adaptive management.
• Build data pipelines, dashboards and visualisations for diverse audiences.
• Prepare monitoring, governance and funding reports for regulators and funders.
• Maintain data quality standards for audit readiness.
• Provide technical input across related programmes and methodologies.

Skills

GIS skills

UAV/drone experience

Data visualization

Statistical analysis

R/Python scripting

Monitoring frameworks

Team collaboration

Education

Tertiary qualification in environmental science / ecology / geography / data science / statistics

Tools

ArcGIS

QGIS

Python

R

Job description

Nelson City Council is recruiting for a Forest Monitoring and Data Specialist who will design and run environmental monitoring, spatial data workflows and reporting systems across forests and hill country reserves. The role blends field science with GIS, UAV surveys and remote sensing to track environmental changes.

You will lead data pipelines and dashboards, apply advanced statistics, and produce governance and funding reports for senior leaders and regulators. A NZ driver license is required.