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Websites that bring customers to your door

Fast, modern websites for local businesses in North Carolina. Yours in weeks, not months.

Serving businesses across North Carolina

Custom websites for local businesses

Get a professional site that helps customers find you, trust you, and take the next step — ready in weeks.

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What I Do

Three areas of focus. One person who connects them.

Water & Environment

Modeling, field science, and environmental analysis

Planning & Infrastructure

Grants, risk analysis, and responsible development

Websites & Data

Websites, dashboards, and data tools for any industry

Selected Work

Projects across water infrastructure, coastal engineering, data science, and software development.

Water & Coastal2025

Mega-Scale Desalination & Water Infrastructure Strategy

Saudi Arabia

Led development of a full-stack decision-support platform for evaluating desalination plant performance, capacity phasing, and lifecycle cost tradeoffs. Built scenario-simulation frameworks using time-series forecasting and Monte Carlo analysis to inform equipment choices, phasing strategies, and financial feasibility for large-scale water infrastructure.

Charlotte Harbor & Matlacha Pass Estuarine Circulation
Water & Coastal2021

Charlotte Harbor & Matlacha Pass Estuarine Circulation

Charlotte County, FL

Field measurements and hydrodynamic analysis of estuarine circulation through Matlacha Pass. Shipboard and bottom-mounted ADCP measurements over ~20-hour tidal cycles, paired with CTD casts for salinity and temperature profiles. Analysis informed stakeholder understanding of ecological risk and fish kill events.

Deep Learning Segmentation of Coastal Tidal Creek Networks
Data & GIS2024

Deep Learning Segmentation of Coastal Tidal Creek Networks

Coastal Georgia, USA

Applied an Attention-based Dense U-Net to automatically segment tidal creek networks from 0.5 m aerial imagery across 255 km² of coastal marshland. Achieved an F1 score of 0.98, replacing labor-intensive manual GIS delineation and enabling landscape-scale analysis of creek–marsh evolution.

About

The Person Behind the Work

Collin Ortals — founder of Pacaya Group

I'm Collin — a PhD coastal engineer turned data scientist and software developer. My work spans water infrastructure strategy in the Middle East, coastal field research across the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, and building analytical tools that help teams make better decisions.

I've done hydraulic modeling for FEMA flood risk studies, delivered coastal alternatives analysis informing hundred-million-dollar infrastructure decisions, built GPU-accelerated simulation tools, and developed full-stack decision-support platforms for infrastructure planning and scenario evaluation. I also build websites for local businesses — because good tools should be available at every scale.

The name comes from Pacaya-Samiria — a protected wilderness in Peru where two rivers converge to form the Amazon. That confluence is the idea: bring engineering, data science, and software together in one place.

PhD Coastal Engineering, University of Florida · BS Civil Engineering, University of Pittsburgh · 350+ citations · Publications in PNAS, Nature Communications