Jenness Enterprises
Wildlife and Forestry Tools for ArcGIS Pro — Tool Reference
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Lois Engelman Memorial Award Fund

In memory of Lois Engelman · Northern Arizona University

Lois died in July 2026. She was Jeff’s wife, his best friend and his partner of 36 years, and Jenness Enterprises was theirs together. A celebration of her life was held in Flagstaff on Sunday, October 25, 2026 (announcement).

Lois Engelman and Jeff Jenness have owned and operated Jenness Enterprises since 2000, providing GIS tools and analysis for clients around the world. The Lois Engelman Memorial Award Fund was created in her name at Northern Arizona University, to honor and celebrate her memory. The award will support the next generation of forestry, wildlife and ecology students, who we will all depend on to protect our planet and natural resources into the future.

Jeff Jenness and Lois Engelman, smiling, outdoors among bare winter branches; Lois wears a Society of American Foresters cap
Jeff and Lois, in their early days. Other photo →

About Lois

Lois Engelman was a girl from the Bronx who made a home for herself in the west. She was a mother and a wife, and an artist, traveler and entrepreneur. She was my best friend and partner for 36 years.

As a girl, Lois climbed trees and made crowns of dandelions in the park. She sang to the neighbors to welcome them in to her apartment building, got in trouble drawing hearts, arrows and the names of boys in magic marker on the door of the Catholic church, and she never stopped going out to meet the world. She followed her heart to college in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where she saw her first farm, her first deer and her first wild forests, and then west to Flagstaff, where she filled her life with friends, sunshine and color. She made stained glass, knitted and felted, gardened, and turned her photographs into gifts. She danced with abandon, sang songs with her own made-up lyrics, and showed up at her neighbors’ doors with plants and food. She stayed close to her sisters and family in New York and to her Jewish traditions. At 74 she traveled alone to Israel to see the country she had dreamed of seeing since she was a girl, and even had her Bat Mitzvah in Jerusalem on the trip.

Lois also carried the deepest loss a parent can know. Her son Alfred died in 1988 when he was only eleven years old, and she loved and grieved for him for the rest of her life. She saw him in the Perseid meteors streaking across the August sky, and in the years that followed we would get up in the middle of the night to watch the shooting stars for Alfie. Through her grief, she never lost her humor or her generosity. If anything, they only grew deeper, if maybe more melancholy. She comforted other parents who had lost children, and she poured her love into Leonard, into her family and friends, and into everyone lucky enough to know her.

Click a picture to see it larger.

Lois as a small girl in plaid overalls, laughing beside a brick wall and a casement window
Lois as a girl
Mary, on the left, and Lois, on the right, young women on a dirt road holding a hand-lettered Marquette sign, with a Morley and Big Rapids mileage sign and Tina's Truck Stop behind them
Mary (left) and Lois, hitchhiking to Marquette in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The two hitchhiked across the country in the late 1960s.
Lois in a red kitchen, smiling over her shoulder as she slides a tray of latkes out of the oven with blue oven mitts
In her kitchen with her famous latkes
Lois on her peace bridge, a wooden footbridge in the garden, hands on a post, smiling back over her shoulder
On her peace bridge
Lois on an ice rink in figure skates, a pink helmet and a red top, one hand on the boards, grinning
On the ice
Lois, on the right in a pink scarf and sunglasses, and Mary, on the left holding the bear's shovel, flanking a Smokey Bear statue under a Williams, AZ USA sign
Lois (right) and Mary with Smokey Bear in Williams, Arizona
Black-and-white photograph of Lois on a train, looking out the window, with Inky, a small doll in a fur-trimmed parka, in her lap
On a train with Inky
Lois laughing, in round glasses and a black top, against a patterned cloth of red and blue ovals
Lois

The award

The award was created by Jeff Jenness in honor and memory of Lois, and is hosted at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, where Jeff earned two of his degrees in the School of Forestry and has taught GIS since 2012. As did Lois, this award supports wildlife and forestry students who want to focus on spatial ecology. Its purpose is to help educate and train the next generation of land managers and ecologists.

How to give

All donations go directly to the Northern Arizona University Foundation, which will manage the funds. Donations are tax-deductible.

Donate through NAU The university’s giving page for the Lois Engelman Memorial Award Fund is not open yet. The link to it will be here as soon as it is.

Any funds Jenness Enterprises receives in connection with the Wildlife and Forestry Tools add-in go to the award.

The add-in

Wildlife and Forestry Tools for ArcGIS Pro is free. It was created to honor and celebrate Lois’s memory by supporting this award, and it carries this dedication:

The Take a Break group of the ribbon, with the Lois Engelman Scholarship button outlined in blue
Where to find it: Lois Engelman Scholarship is in the Take a Break group of the Wildlife and Forestry tab.
This software is dedicated to the memory of Lois Engelman (wife, best friend and partner of the author for 36 years). If these tools are helpful and valuable to you, please consider donating to the Lois Engelman Memorial Award Fund, which helps educate and train the next generation of land managers and ecologists.

On the ribbon, the Lois Engelman Scholarship button in the Take a Break group opens a card with a photograph of Lois and Jeff and a short description of the award. About the award on the card opens this page, and Donate through NAU opens the university’s giving page. The card opens only when the button is clicked. It can be dragged anywhere on the screen, does not block ArcGIS Pro while it is open, and closes with Close or the × in its corner.

A parchment-colored card titled Lois Engelman Memorial Award Fund, with a photograph of Jeff and Lois on the left, four short paragraphs about the award on the right, the dedication below them, and three buttons: About the award, Donate through NAU, and Close
The award card in the add-in. Each time it opens it shows one of two photographs of Lois and Jeff.