Melissa A. Widas

Melissa Widas is a geographic information systems specialist at Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission. She began working as an affiliate at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in January 2025. Melissa received a Master of Environmental Data Science from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2024 and a B.S. in Environmental Science from Montana State University in 2022. During her graduate work, Melissa developed a tool to map milkweed habitat suitability and plan surveys to aid in monarch butterfly conservation. During her time in undergraduate Melissa worked with watershed data in order to inform drought management planning and inform stakeholders of watershed conditions.