Julien Moeys Soil scientist · R programmer · Data analyst

Curriculum vitae

Page content: Contact · Education · Fields of expertise · Professional experience · Languages · Projects · Publications · Teaching · Informatics · Open Source · Associations

Contact

See the home page of this site.

Time series of pesticide losses at the landscape scale

Education

Fields of expertise

  • Modelling water flow and pesticide fate in soils;

  • Estimating the risks of diffuse pesticide losses at the regional scale;

  • Robust and efficient statistics for estimating model parameters from easily available proxy-data (pedotransfer functions and pedometrics);

  • Programming techniques (R) for data management and analysis, including geographical datasets;

See also this description of my current "research and development" and teaching activities.

Professional experience

Languages

  • French: mother tongue.
  • English: full professional proficiency, including for scientific work tasks (approximately a C2 level).
  • Swedish: effective but limited proficiency (approximately a B2 level).
  • German: beginner. "Folkuniversitetet" evening course A1-2 (2014), and evening course A2-1 (2015, ongoing).

Projects

  • 2003 - 2007. ESHEL project (during my PhD). "Charactersing the risk of contamination of the Beauce aquifer by pesticides. Understanding the mechanisms of transport by preferential flow and risk analysis at the watershed scale". Project led by Pr. Yves Coquet (AgroParisTech).

  • 2008. FOOTPRINT (during my 1st postdoc), an EU FP6 project. Developing a suite of three pesticide risk prediction and management tools. Project led by Igor Dubus (BRGM).

  • 2009 - now. MACRO-SE. See professional experience above.

  • 2013 - 2016. PERFORM. "Modelling approaches to evaluate and compare the environmental performance of innovative cropping systems designed to pesticide usage: spatio-temporal integration and treatment of uncertainties". Project led by Laure Mamy (EGC, INRA) and funded by ONEMA and the French Ministry of Agriculture Agrifood and Forestry, in the context of its Écophyto program.

I have been involved in the PhD work of Abdul Ghafoor (defended in 2013) and Karin Steffens (defence planned for 2015). See the publication list below.

Publications

See my publication list on this page.

See also my publication list on ▸ Google Scholar or ▸ SLUPub (SLU publication database).

Teaching

Informatics

  • R programming language for statistical computing:

    • Writing and documenting R packages (developer and maintainer of > 20 packages. I use roxygen2 and inlinedocs documentation systems.
    • S3 and S4 object-oriented programming.
    • Processing geographic data in R with sp, maptools, raster, rgeos and rgdal.
    • Automatic report generation with knitr or Sweave.
    • Interface with databases (see below).
    • Writing FORTRAN subroutines (limited experience).
    • I have been teaching two short courses on R programming (see above)

  • Database systems: SQLite, MySQL, MS Access, SQL and database interface with R (see my project easydb).

  • Version control with Subversion and Git (and GitHub), as well as the tools such Redmine (and before Trac) or WebSVN.

  • Web development: I have a small experience in PHP, HTML and CSS programming (see my project ssld). I have recently started using the site generator Jekyll. See also the paragraph on content management systems below.

  • I have some basic knowledge on how to install and maintain a Linux (Ubuntu) web-server and how to write bash scripts for automatic tasks (including cron tasks). I have maintained the web server of the French Soil Science Association for more than three years (see below).

  • Content Management Systems (CMS): I now use Jekyll site generator (not a CMS, but contrary to most CMS, Jekyll websites do not require time consuming security upgrades), but I have used several content management systems, like DokuWiki (wiki system), Piwigo (picture galleries), and Spip, and tested quite a few others.

  • geographic information system (GIS): See the paragraph on R GIS features above. I also use ArcGIS regularly.

  • Graphics editor: Regular user of Inkscape or The Gimp.

Open Source

  • Creator & maintainer of the R package easylegend (on GitHub), a package for generating plot aesthetics and legends for categorical and continuous data, with a focus on variables spanning across several orders of magnitudes (such as maps of pesticide concentrations), that require custom, non-linear legends.

  • Creator & maintainer of the R package soiltexture ("The Soil Texture Wizard"; on CRAN), a package for plotting soil texture triangle and classifying soil texture data, providing 16 texture classification systems from around the world. See also this gallery of texture triangles.

  • Creator & maintainer of the R packages soilwaterfun and soilwaterptf (on r-forge) implementing commonly used functions for soil water retention, soil hydraulic conductivity and some pedotransfer functions for parametrising them from easily available soil properties.

  • Creator & maintainer of the project easydb ("Easy database interface"), a collection of R packages making it easier to read and write data from various database system (MySQL, SQLite, MS Access and MS Excel). It is build on lower level R packages RODBC, DBI and RSQlite;

  • Creator & maintainer of the R package macroutils, a collection of utility functions for the pesticide fate model MACRO. macroutils provides functions for importing and exporting MACRO binary input/output data files, for visualising their content and for converting them. macroutils includes simple text-based interfaces for fast and efficient operations.

  • Creator of a geographical directory of soil science research groups around the world (ssld). Geo-reference more than 350 groups in 67 countries. Not maintained any longer.

See also this page on my software development.

Associations

  • Between 2011 and 2013 (and a a bit before that) I was webmaster and member of the board of the French Soil Science Association (AFES).

  • Between 2012 and 2014 I was member of the board of the Uppsala-based association Families for International Friendship (FIF). This non-political and non-relegious association (founded in 1965) organises cultural and social activities for Uppsala foreign students and researchers, and aims at broadening mutual cultural understanding.