Data engineering · Full stack · Geospatial · Data science · Botany
Botanyat the scale ofsystems.
I'm Lucas S.B. Jordão, MSc and PhD in Botany. I spent twenty years learning how knowledge about plants is produced, and six building the infrastructure that turns it into decisions — pipelines, applications and geospatial analysis for Brazil's plant extinction-risk assessments.
- Status
- Available for new roles
- Setup
- Remote, hybrid or Rio de Janeiro
- Availability
- Immediate start
MIMOSA
TAXONOMIC DESCRIPTION
TAXONOMIC DESCRIPTION
00 / POINT OF VIEW
Biodiversity does not fit in a spreadsheet.
It needs systems that understand names, places, evidence and time — and turn them into decisions that can be explained.
My practice cuts across herbaria, code and public policy. I don't translate science into technology: I design both together.
01 / DETERMINATION KEY
Where I fit in your team
Four profiles,
one person.
A taxonomist identifies an unknown specimen by working through a dichotomous key: pairs of alternatives that narrow down to a name. This profile is deliberately broad. Work through the key to reach the part of it that solves your problem.
Start here
The knowledge you need…
Determination
Choose 1a or 1b to determine
MORPHOLOGICAL PLATE / MIMOSAdiversity of forms and terms
FEATURED PUBLICATION / 2020
Taxonomy · Comparative morphology
A shared language
for trichomes.
Before morphology could be structured as data, the language used to describe form had to be organised first.
In Trichomes in Mimosa, together with Marli Pires Morim and José Fernando A. Baumgratz, I proposed a characterisation of the genus's trichomes and a standardised terminology to make their taxonomic use more consistent and comparable.
FLORA · VOLUME 272ARTICLE 151702
Read the paper 02 / CASE STUDY
CNCFlora · 2020—2026
Infrastructure for
assessing a flora.
Assessing extinction risk means coordinating fragmented evidence, spatial analysis and a lot of people. At CNCFlora/JBRJ I turned that process into an architecture of data, queues and interfaces. I gathered and documented the requirements with Sphinx-Needs, keeping traceability between need and implementation, and built the team's service catalog in Backstage.
My scope
Architecture · requirements engineering · full stack development · ETL · automation · geoprocessing · CI/CD · service catalog · observability
Architecture of the workfrom raw data to decision
COORDINATEWorkflowstages · roles · audit trail
PROCESSBull–ProFloraETL · queues · logs
INTERPRETAvalia–CNCFloramaps · metrics · text
PUBLISHOpen data and new methodsweb pages · applicability · scientific papers
Prototype not adoptedCoordinate
Tracking Panel
I designed and built an application to make stages, owners, blockers and progress visible across hundreds of assessments in real time.
My contribution
The application was never rolled out institutionally. The workflow actually used stayed in a spreadsheet I configured with Apps Script, APIs, messaging and operational logs — and which carried the operation through to the end of the period.
ETL in operation01 / 02
Orchestrate
Bull–ProFlora
I designed and implemented the ETL that connected ProFlora to asynchronous queues, making heavy processing controllable, repeatable and auditable.
My contribution
The processing layer and its integrations were my delivery. The admin interface shown is Bull Board, the generic public dashboard from the Bull ecosystem.
Internal application01 / 05
Analyse
Avalia–CNCFlora
I built an environment that brings together taxonomic data, geospatial analysis, charts and supporting text for assessments under IUCN criteria.
My contribution
I worked from architecture to interface: modelled the data in PostgreSQL/PostGIS, built the NestJS back end exposing REST and GraphQL APIs, developed the Next.js front end, implemented CI/CD pipelines in GitLab, and integrated MapBiomas, AOO and EOO metrics, land-use trends and the structured writing of assessment rationales.
LEGACY SYSTEMHistorical holdings
→
ORCHESTRATIONAirflow
TRANSFORMATIONdbtProFlorarecovered data
Recover
Legacy data rescue
I planned and executed the rescue of the legacy system's data, migrating the historical holdings into the ProFlora architecture.
My contribution
Explore the public data I ran every stage of the migration: orchestrated extraction and loading with Apache Airflow, modelled and validated the transformations with dbt, and delivered the recovered legacy into the new database. That data now powers CNCFlora's public portal.
03 / SELECTED WORK
Projects that keep
knowledge in circulation.
Software, data and publications built so scientific knowledge can be queried, tested and reused. Everything below is public and verifiable.
10 projects in All
01Open project Taxonomy as code Taxonomy
TypeTaxonScript
A published framework that turns biological descriptions into typed, validatable, versionable and collaborative data — with its own scholar record on Google Patents.
02Open project Explorable knowledge Software
TTS–Mimosa
A proof of concept connecting morphological characters, images and sources in a navigable taxonomic interface.
03Open project Taxonomic characters as software Taxonomy
TTS–Mimosa Docs
Typed documentation of Mimosa characters, organised into navigable modules and maintained with software engineering tooling.
04Open project Data-driven conservation Conservation
LULC × Leguminosae
Land-cover and land-use time series converted into quantitative evidence for extinction-risk assessments.
05Open project History, ranking and accepted names Software
FFB Chronology
A general-purpose application that compares 394 versions of the Flora e Funga do Brasil, surfaces taxonomic changes, builds filterable rankings and resolves accepted names in batch with fuzzy search.
06Open project Mathematics in the browser Software
Curva
A graphing calculator written from scratch, with no maths library at all: its own expression parser, step-by-step symbolic differentiation, numerical integration and limits, curve fitting with residuals and SSE, statistics and analytic geometry. It grew out of my Data Science degree.
07Open project Assisted scientific writing Open science
Quarto Scientific Writing
An extension with real-time diagnostics for style, structure, readability and consistency in scientific manuscripts.
08Open project Reading without noise Open science
Quarto Focus Mode
Focus mode, section-by-section presentation, keyboard navigation and smart progress for Quarto sites and books.
09Open project One document, many versions Open science
Quarto Conditional Vars
An extension that renders conditional content from project variables, with composable rules and compatibility across Quarto engines.
10Open project How to cite, in one click Open science
Quarto cite-this
An extension that adds an accessible "how to cite" control to Quarto books and websites, copying the citation as CSL-formatted text or BibTeX. Citations are built at render time, with no browser library, and work with embedded resources or with JavaScript off.
04 / COURSE MATERIAL
Open-access courses and handbooks
A shelf for
teaching in public.
Course books written in Quarto and published openly: environmental law, extinction risk assessment, public policy and phyloinformatics. Each spine is as thick as the book has chapters.
COURSE 01 · 23 chaptersLaw applied to the protection of Brazilian flora and vegetation
- Atlantic Forest Biome Act
- Forest Act and public forest management
- Crimes and offences against flora
- Sequence assembly and alignment
- Evolution models and phylogenetic analysis
- Phylogenetics in R
- PRONABIO, CONABIO and Pró-Espécies
- Official national lists of threatened species
- CNCFlora/JBRJ and CITES
- Fundamental principles
- Organisation of the State and its Powers
- Economic and social order
- Biodiversity knowledge and conservation
- Sustainable use and benefit sharing
- Legal and institutional capacity
- The IUCN Red List
- Data quality
- Categories and criteria
- The Brazilian legal system
- Constitutional environmental law
- National Environment Policy
- Dichotomous key viewer
- Step-by-step identification mode
- JSON structure editor
08 volumes · 74 chapters · open access
05 / TECHNOLOGY
From scientific writing to infrastructure
Technologies that run through
the work.
44technologies & methods
A toolkit built on real problems: scientific applications, data engineering, reproducible publishing and infrastructure.
01Languages & interfaces10 items
02Data & pipelines15 items
03Infrastructure & cloud9 items
04Publishing & methods10 items
JavaScriptLanguages & interfaces
TypeScriptLanguages & interfaces
PythonLanguages & interfaces
RLanguages & interfaces
Node.jsLanguages & interfaces
ReactLanguages & interfaces
Next.jsLanguages & interfaces
NextraLanguages & interfaces
GraphQLLanguages & interfaces.*RegExLanguages & interfaces
dbtData & pipelines
MongoDBData & pipelines
PostgreSQLData & pipelines
Apache ParquetData & pipelines
DuckDBData & pipelines
TrinoData & pipelines
RedisData & pipelines
ClickHouseData & pipelines
Apache AirflowData & pipelines
Apache KafkaData & pipelines
RabbitMQData & pipelines
NumPyData & pipelines
PandasData & pipelines
JupyterData & pipelines
Google Earth EngineData & pipelines
LinuxInfrastructure & cloud
DebianInfrastructure & cloud
FedoraInfrastructure & cloud
DockerInfrastructure & cloud
GitInfrastructure & cloud
BackstageInfrastructure & cloud
Google CloudInfrastructure & cloud
AWSInfrastructure & cloud
AzureInfrastructure & cloud
LaTeXPublishing & methods
QuartoPublishing & methods
SphinxPublishing & methodsSphinx-NeedsPublishing & methods
Reveal.jsPublishing & methods◇CRISP-DMPublishing & methods
KKDDPublishing & methods
ScrumPublishing & methods↗AgilePublishing & methods
GIMPPublishing & methods06 / PHENOLOGY
Working rhythm, 2023—2026
Phenology of a
living repository.
Phenology is the study of a plant's cycles of activity across the year: when it flushes, when it flowers, when it rests. The same instrument reads four years of commits.
The scale is shared across all four years — GitHub normalises each year on its own, which would make a slow year look as intense as a strong one.
- Contributions in the period
- 4,654
- Days with activity
- 776
- Peak in a single day
- 96
- Period observed
- 2023—26
Source: GitHub contributions API · lsbjordao · private repositories included · captured JUL 30, 2026
| Year | JAN | FEB | MAR | APR | MAY | JUN | JUL | AUG | SEP | OCT | NOV | DEC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 21 | 62 | 58 | 62 | 99 | 61 | 162 | 213 | 148 | 29 | 80 | 135 |
| 2024 | 88 | 103 | 110 | 171 | 86 | 43 | 38 | 72 | 109 | 104 | 65 | 22 |
| 2025 | 17 | 87 | 122 | 187 | 64 | 26 | 17 | 17 | 10 | 153 | 256 | 36 |
| 2026 | 38 | 128 | 109 | 208 | 466 | 271 | 301 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Career archive · Botany01 / 19
I learned in the field.
Fieldwork · botanical practiceReading the plant before recording the dataBotanical expeditions · Brazil
07 / CAREER
From the specimen
to the infrastructure.
Before the pipelines came the trails, benches and collections. That is where I learned to observe rigorously, preserve context and turn scattered evidence into knowledge other people can use.
Fieldwork · botanical practice
Knowledge with its feet on the ground
Botanical expeditions · BrazilCollecting means deciding under real conditions: observing, documenting, preserving context and returning with reliable evidence. That field discipline still guides how I design data and systems.
Laboratory · molecular biology
From morphology to DNA
Cenargen / EMBRAPA · Brasília, BrazilDuring my PhD, I worked in the Cenargen/EMBRAPA laboratory, bringing together molecular data, phylogenetics, biogeography and the evolutionary history of plants I already knew from the field.
Herbaria · scientific collections
Physical collections, accessible knowledge
Museu Nacional / UFRJ · NYBGI worked with botanical collections throughout my training. In 2016, I spent a year at the New York Botanical Garden, digitising specimens and helping turn physical holdings into accessible data.
Timeline2004 — now
The first specimen
I start studying Mimosa at the National School of Tropical Botany. The genus becomes the thread running through everything that follows.
Taxonomy in depth
Master's at Museu Nacional/UFRJ: working with herbarium collections, expeditions, morphological description and the first new species.
From morphology to phylogeny
PhD at JBRJ. In 2016, I spend a year at NYBG digitising specimens; at Cenargen/EMBRAPA, I work with DNA and phylogenetics. Biogeography and six loci in conversation — and my first lines of R.
Conservation at scale
Analyst at CNCFlora/JBRJ's Red List unit. I turn assessment rules, data and routines into pipelines, applications and operational workflows.
Formalising the engineering
A second degree, in Data Science, to give name and method to what was already daily practice: modelling, statistics and data engineering.
Looking for the next team
I close the CNCFlora chapter with systems in operation, legacy data recovered and methods published. I'm looking for a team where domain, data and product are the same conversation.
08 / WRITING & PUBLICATIONS
Thinking in
public form.
Visit the blog 0114 JUL 2026
Flora e Funga do Brasil — Chronology
Digital product0215 JUN 2026Improving Scientific Writing in Quarto with Real-Time Feedback
Open source0314 MAR 2024TypeTaxonScript: enhancing data structures in biological systematics
Scientific paper0401 AUG 2022MapBiomas and extinction-risk assessment of the Brazilian flora
Public policy09 / CONTACT
Next chapter
Science and public management need
living, integrated infrastructure.
I'm available for new roles and interested in teams where biodiversity, data and digital product have to work as one thing. I reply on LinkedIn within one business day.