Position Title: GIS Support Steward – AmeriCorps

Conservation Legacy Program: Stewards Individual Placements

Site Location: Yellowstone Center for Resources, Mammoth Hot Springs, WY 82190

Application Due: July 3, 2026

Terms of Service:

• Start Date: 10/05/2026
• End Date: 03/19/2026
• AmeriCorps Slot Classification: 675-Hour Slot

Purpose:

Stewards Individual Placements (Stewards), a program of Conservation Legacy, provides individuals with AmeriCorps service and career internship opportunities to strengthen communities and preserve our natural resources. Participants serve with federal agencies, tribal governments, and nonprofits to provide institutional capacity, develop community relationships, and support ecosystem health. Stewards in partnership with the NPS GIS office is hosting a cohort of GIS stewards.

This position is located at Yellowstone National Park in northwest Wyoming. On March 1, 1872, Yellowstone became the world’s first national park for all to enjoy the area’s unique hydrothermal and geologic features. Within Yellowstone's 2.2 million acres, visitors have unparalleled opportunities to observe wildlife in an intact ecosystem, explore geothermal areas that contain about half the world’s active geysers, and hike intermountain northern Rocky Mountain ranges. Home to more than 1,500 plant taxa, the vegetation communities of Yellowstone National Park include overlapping combinations of species typical of the Rocky Mountains. Forests made up of lodgepole pine, Engelmann spruce, subalpine fir, whitebark pine, and limber pine cover roughly 80% of the park.

For more information about Yellowstone NP, please visit http://www.nps.gov/yell

We are seeking a GIS Steward to join our vegetation management team in Mammoth, WY to provide crucial data management and visualization support. The Steward will coordinate with the various vegetation management work group leads (native plant restoration, invasive plant management, and vegetation monitoring) to improve data capture, organization, and presentation. Opportunities may be available to contribute to other GIS projects as they arise. This position will significantly enhance the incumbent's proficiency in the following key NPS Competencies: coordination and communication, critical thinking and problem solving, technology application, information quality assurance, project organization and management, and data and metadata management.

Description of Duties:

Project 1: Improve spatial representation and utility of park-wide invasive plant population and treatment data.

The goal of this project is to revamp how invasive plant data is currently collected and stored in Yellowstone’s Invasive Plants database with the goal of improving future usability of data (e.g. fieldwork project planning and prioritization, sharing with partners and contractors, and end of season reporting). At present, Yellowstone NP’s invasive plant data contains multiple large datasets capturing both invasive plant population data and past removal or treatment efforts, typically displayed jointly in a Web Map. While the overall framework of layers performs well enough, the current data collection standards and related attribute fields yield poor data visualization, making it difficult to operationalize for planning field work and sharing maps with other work groups. Additionally, it does not allow for easy parsing through queries.

The project will necessitate the ability to consider all aspects of invasive plant data from field collection to generation of usable maps for multiple end users. This will likely include, but may not be limited to:

• Time spent in field and office settings, under the guidance of a Vegetation Biologist, to learn current field data collection procedures and gain an understanding of invasive plant distributions on the landscape.
• Modifying existing or developing new layers and attributes to store invasive plant population and treatment data that would allow for improved visualization and querying, largely ensuring the ability to generate specific attribute and spatial queries
• Modifying existing or developing new data collection forms for ESRI Fieldmaps app to populate layers
• Writing correlating field data collection SOPs for new/modified field data collection standards and forms
• Field testing new collection standards to ensure applicability and efficiency in field collection
• Integrating previously collected data points into newly established standards to create one unified database
• Generating pre-set queries for quick and easy data filtering
• Ensuring spatial representation is intuitive for generalist audiences
• Updating or creating a new AGOL dashboard to track and report on annual fieldwork progress

Project 2: Long-term Vegetation Monitoring Dashboard (if time allows)

For this project the data is well organized and will offer the candidate an opportunity to collaborate with the Greater Yellowstone Inventory and Monitoring Division through the vegetation ecologist at Yellowstone NP. The goal is to create a dashboard or experience that summarizes key vegetation trends for the 10 years of sagebrush monitoring data collected.

Key characteristics of the project:

• Trends over time for species using different filters for genus, species, functional group, nativity etc.
• Custom date ranges for trends
• Summaries that include number of days sampled, number of quads sampled, etc. to quantify sampling effort in that year.

Requirements:

• United States citizen, United States national, or a lawful permanent resident alien
• Applicants must be between ages of 18-30 years old, or up to 35 for veteran, based on Public Land Corps Act of 1993 authorizing this AmeriCorps opportunity.
• Has received a high school diploma or equivalency certificate; or has not dropped out of elementary or secondary school to enroll as an AmeriCorps participant, and agrees to obtain a high school diploma or its equivalent prior to using the education award
• Agrees to provide information to establish eligibility and to complete a National Service Criminal History Check.

Preferred Qualifications

A successful candidate will:

• Have experience in GIS database creation, management, and visualization, ideally through use of ESRI software, platforms, and apps.
• Have critical thinking and creative solution seeking skills. These are crucial as the candidate will need to conceptualize visual products for multiple end users by integrating several large datasets.
• Be a strong written and verbal communicator. They will need to document and report progress to the Vegetation Program team to ensure all changes are understood and in alignment with desired outcomes. It will also be important to develop a well-written set of data collection standards to accompany ESRI Fieldmaps forms for data collection.
• Have great attention to detail and be organized to maintain a record of work done, particularly in creating any joint relationships between multiple data layers, apps, and web displays.
• Feel comfortable taking initiative and working independently. While weekly meetings and frequent guidance will be provided, daily and weekly tasks will be identified by the Steward.

Applicants who have obtained or are pursuing a GIS degree or certificate and/or with GIS experience are preferred. Prior to starting this position, a federal government security background clearance will be required.

Our Commitment:

Conservation Legacy is committed to the full consideration of all qualified individuals and will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations to perform essential job functions. Physical requirements may include periodic overnight travel, non-traditional work hours, ability to move across varied terrain, use program-specific tools and a range of technology on an infrequent or frequent basis. Exerting up to 25 pounds of force occasionally to lift, carry, push, pull, or otherwise move objects. The ability to safely drive an organizational vehicle may also be required for some positions. If you need assistance and/or reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or recruiting process, please send a request to the hiring manager.

Time Requirements:

• Typically, this position is expected to serve 40 hours per week, but exact service schedules may vary. A half hour lunch break will not be counted towards AmeriCorps service
• Member may be required to participate in national, state, or local service projects or events as part of their service term.

Orientation and Training:

• Member will receive an orientation that includes training on AmeriCorps prohibited and unallowable activities.

Benefits:

• Segal AmeriCorps Education Award of $2,817.14
• Living Allowance of $600 per week.
• Additional Benefit of $360 per week.
• Housing: Shared housing (own bedroom with shared kitchen, bathroom, laundry) is available in Mammoth, WY.

Evaluation and Reporting:

As an AmeriCorps member, performance will be evaluated on whether the member has completed the required number of hours, the member has satisfactorily completed assignments, and if the member has met other performance criteria that were clearly communicated at the beginning of the term of service.

Reporting requirements include, but are not limited to, bi-weekly timesheets and accomplishment tracking.

Supervisor Name and Contact Information:

Program Contact information: James Gasaway, jgasaway@conservationlegacy.org

Service Site Contact Information:

Steven Bekedam, Supervisory Veg Specialist, 307-344-2161

Pamela Schaefer, Vegetation Biologist, 307-250-5550

Conservation Legacy is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy, age, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or reasonable accommodations due to a disability during the application or recruiting process, please send a request to the hiring manager.