About

I am a bioeconomic modeller with botanical epidemiology and ecology training who specialises in agricultural simulation modelling and geographic information systems (GIS). I have expertise in R programming and have developed several tools to help gather weather and climate data and study pathogen populations using R and have also recently started using Julia too.

Along with Emerson Del Ponte, I co-founded Open Plant Pathology, a community of plant pathology, plant disease epidemiology, pathogen population biology, microbial ecology and genomics researchers that supports the several forms of open science practices in plant pathology.

Web

  0000-0002-0061-8359
  @adamshsparks@hachyderm.io
  @adamshsparks@aus.social
  adamhsparks
  adamhsparks
  adamhsparks

Pronouns

He/Him/His

CV

Adam H. Sparks’s CV

Education

Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA

  • 2009 - Ph.D. of Plant Pathology in Epidemiology and Ecology of Plant Pathogens studying with Dr Karen Garrett

  • 2007 - Graduate Certificate in Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing

Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

  • 2000 - B.S. of Agronomy in Soil and Crop Management

Employment

State of Western Australia Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development

  • Senior Research Scientist, Bioeconomic Modeller from Jan 2021 to Current

University of Southern Queensland

  • Associate Professor, Field Crops Pathology from Jan 2016 to Jan 2021

International Rice Research Institute

  • Scientist I, Plant Disease Management Specialist from December 2012 to December 2015

  • Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Botanical Modelling and GIS from January 2011 to November 2012

Kansas State University

  • Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Modelling Wheat Fusarium Head Blight from January 2010 to January 2011

Service

rOpenSci

Open Plant Pathology

  • Co-founder

Tropical Plant Pathology

Research

Highlighted research papers and project outputs

Code

As a part of practising open science and reproducible research, some of my software’s code is available at my GitHub, @adamhsparks.

I have written and maintain several R packages available both on CRAN and GitHub.

Weather or Climate Data Clients for R

  • {bomrang} - Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) weather data API Client for R

  • {chirps} - Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station Data (CHIRPS) API data client for R

  • {getCRUCLdata} - University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) climate data API client for R

  • {GSODR} - Global Surface Summary of the Day (GSOD) Weather Data API Client for R

  • {nasapower} - NASA POWER Global Meteorology, Surface Solar Energy and Climatology Data API Client for R

  • {weatherOz} - An API Client for Australian Weather and Climate Data Resources

Plant Pathology Packages for R

  • {ascotraceR} - A mechanistic model to simulate the spread of Ascochyta blight in a chickpea field

  • {epicrop} - Simulation modelling of crop diseases using a Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Removed (SEIR) model in R

  • {hagis} - Analysis of plant pathogen pathotype complexities, distributions and diversity in R

Plant Pathology Package for Julia

  • Epicrop.jl - Simulation modelling of crop diseases using a Healthy-Latent-Infectious-Postinfectious (HLIP) model in Julia