Marylee Murphy

About Marylee

Marylee Murphy is a Geospatial Developer at U-Spatial, based in Duluth, where she has worked since 2021 (first as a GIS Specialist, and as Geospatial Developer since 2025). She holds an M.P.S. in Geospatial Information Sciences from the University of Maryland and an M.S. in Geology from the University of Minnesota, where her thesis applied the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) to the Willow River Watershed in St. Croix County, Wisconsin, along with a B.A. in Computer Science and Geology from Colby College.

Her career spans more than two decades of water and environmental data work: she began as a Limnology Data and Modeling Specialist at the University of Colorado's CIRES Center for Limnology, then worked as a Research Assistant at the St. Croix Watershed Research Station and a Water Resources Specialist with Three Rivers Park District in the Twin Cities, before spending five years as a Database Administrator at the Lake Superior Research Institute at UW-Superior. 

At U-Spatial, her work focuses on web applications, data management, and environmental science, including geocoding and watershed modeling.

Key Projects and Initiatives

Freshwater ballast water compliance monitoring 
Marylee co-authored a series of Great Waters Research Collaborative reports (2018 and 2021) verifying compliance monitoring devices used to test ballast water treatment systems on Great Lakes cargo ships, helping ensure invasive species aren't introduced through ballast discharge.

SWAT watershed sediment modeling 
Published in the Journal of Environmental Quality, this study applied the Soil and Water Assessment Tool to scale sediment delivery estimates from individual fields up to the full watershed level in an agricultural landscape shaped by topographic depressions.

Willow River Watershed study 
Marylee's master's thesis applied SWAT modeling to the Willow River Watershed in St. Croix County, Wisconsin, laying the groundwork for the sediment-delivery research she would go on to publish.