Jennifer Elstrott

Jennifer Elstrott

GIS Analyst

Jennifer is a Pacific Northwest native, where she grew up backpacking and mushroom picking. Her lifelong love for beautiful landscapes and communities along with an innate curiosity fuels her passion for creating holistic understanding of natural systems through GIS analysis. Data can tell a powerful story, and she loves helping her clients make data-driven decisions with insightful analysis.
(503) 501-5227

Jennifer is a Pacific Northwest native, where she grew up backpacking and mushroom picking. Her lifelong love for beautiful landscapes and communities along with an innate curiosity fuels her passion for creating holistic understanding of natural systems through GIS analysis. Data can tell a powerful story, and she loves helping her clients make data-driven decisions with insightful analysis.  

Jennifer joined MFA in 2018 with an academic background in GIS and environmental science, focusing on climate resilience and disaster risk reduction. At MFA, she plays pivotal roles in data wrangling and management for many projects including siting analysis, data visualization, brownfield inventories, affordable housing planning, demographic characterization, climate resilience mapping, and infrastructure data management. 

Jennifer enjoys exploring innovative new approaches to data analysis and visualization, and she has expertise in geospatial analysis, geodatabase design and management, web mapping application design, data processing automation, and cartographic design. 

A favorite project and why? 

My favorite project at MFA (so far) was the culverts and salmon recovery storymap for the Association of Washington Cities. My analysis found that though many state-owned fish barriers along creeks were funded for removal, city barriers in between them were still blocking fish passage and no funding or plans for removal were available. I loved this project because it is a perfect example of science as storytelling—it concisely and beautifully illustrated the need for city barrier removal in addition to the planned state barrier removal, and showed just how impactful that would be for increasing salmon spawning habitat. 

Education & Experience

  • Master of Science in Environmental Science and Policy, Johns Hopkins University
  • Graduate Certificate in Geographic Information Systems, Johns Hopkins University
  • Bachelor of Science in Geography, Portland State University

Related Projects

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Port of Bellingham Image

Client: Port of Bellingham

Port of Bellingham Sea-Level Rise Web Viewer