Spatial Analysis in Macroecology

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

It’s my turn to teach a lesson next week for the stats class I’m taking this semester (everyone has to do one; my topic is analyzing spatial data). This class was supposed to focus on SAS, but so far we’ve done almost nothing in SAS (which is fine with me since I don’t really care that much about learning SAS at this moment; I think JMP will be fine for most of my thesis needs). Especially since it looks like next week I might not do anything with SAS at all; instead, my professor wants me to play around with a program called SAM (Spatial Analysis in Macroecology), so I did a bit of that this evening.

And so far it looks pretty cool! I think I might be able to do some of the things I planned to do in ArcGIS in SAM instead, and a bit more easily. We shall see. It took me all evening to import a data set (for a really stupid reason I should have caught a lot sooner, but OH WELL :D. I thought it was a Mac to PC problem, and part of it was, but mostly it was that I had a numeric value in one of my column labels and apparently the program hates that).

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ANYHOODLE there they are. Those are ALL the nests we’ve found for this particular population of turtles in six years of field research. (Including viable nests, nest attempts, and predated nests). This isn’t the data set I’ll use for the meat of my analysis; I’m just going to use these to calculate a mean nest distance value for this population. But this was a good place to start with SAM, I think. Tomorrow, I’ll play around with this a bit more and see what cool stuff I can do. For now though, I like it. And I guess I can put together some sort of presentation about it, assuming this is what my professor decides he wants me to teach. Even if he ends up having me do stuff in JMP (or even SAS), it’s okay – I’m glad to be having the opportunity to learn a bit about SAM. I think it might be really useful to me down the road.

Storage Space in Evernote

- Wendy St. John 1 Comment

I remember reading something about you using Evernote, and I was wondering if you ever run out of space to store things? I was thinking about getting into using it. ~ Anonymous

Hi! The short answer is, no – you don’t ever run out of storage space over the long run, but the long answer is slightly more complicated.

The way Evernote handles the issue of space is that you get a certain amount of upload capability per month. With a free account, it’s 60 MB per month, which is a lot of text notes, but if you start uploading images or pdfs, you can use that up pretty quickly. For a paid account ($5 a month), you get 1GB of storage per month, which is, well, rather a lot. Then, at the end of the month, your storage limits reset, so you get another 60 MB or 1 GB of data. If you are just getting started, and want to get a bunch of data uploaded, you could always pay for an account just for a month or two, to get all your things onto their server*, and then continue on with a free account. Because, once you have uploaded something to the server, it’s there until you delete it, and you have unlimited storage space from that perspective. In other words, you’re limited to the amount you can upload in a single month, but ultimately, the storage is unlimited.

I don’t know exactly how much storage space I am using (several GBs; I have a lot of things scanned documents saved as pdfs, so I can throw away the paper copies), but I have about 17,000 individual notes in Evernote, and it works fine. Sometimes, with that many notes, the search function is a little slow, but it’s still WAY faster than if I had to try and find things by navigating through folders as I did before Evernote.

Hopefully this answers your question. 🙂 I genuinely love Evernote and use it every single day, so I would highly recommend it.

*A free way to get around the single month upload limit is that you can put an unlimited number of notes into “local” folders – ones that are not sync’d to Evernote’s servers. It only uses upload space when you put things in a “synchronized” notebook. For me, a big part of Evernote is having the cloud back up so I basically sync everything, but while you’re getting started, if you want to avoid having to pay for an account, you could put notes in a local folder, get them all tagged and organized the way you want them, and then just transfer them slowly, over time, into synchronized notebooks as you get more storage space each month.

A Nice Thing Happened Today . . .

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Another nice thing happened at school today when I ran into one of my former students. When he was in my class, he’d asked me to write a letter of recommendation for him, to accompany his application for a reasonably prestigious scholarship. I was more than happy to do so; he is an excellent student and an all around lovely person. Well, he GOT the scholarship, and the Chancellor of the university told him that the letter I wrote him was crucial in the decision they made to award him the scholarship. It was a really good feeling to know I legit helped something good happen for this young man. Also, he gave me a hug. I love getting hugs from former students. It just makes me happy.

Today Was One of Those Days

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So, sometimes I realize that I just really enjoy teaching. Today was one of those days. It was an easy lab, from the teaching standpoint. They worked in small groups to discuss questions from readings about influenza and prion diseases; mostly, all I had to do was wander around and answer questions and clarify things and make sure they were on the right track in finding the answers. But of course, sometimes I just pull up a chair and jump into their discussions, and it’s just SO COOL. There is some amazing knowledge in their brains, and it’s wonderful to hear them make connections and add new information to the discussions. (Like the guy who told us the whole lifecycle of toxoplasmosis, and you could just tell he thought it was SUPER COOL). And they decided that prions are basically zombie brain cells, which is scarily accurate, really.

I did lecture a bit, about influenza pandemics, and the thing that was REALLY COOL is that when I tried to get their attention, and they didn’t quiet down right away, my usual technique is to just stop talking (instead of trying to shout over them; as long as a couple of people realize I want the class’ attention, eventually they’ll get the hint and shush the others). But tonight, when I stopped talking? They totally got the hint right away, and I had silence in, like, three seconds. THIS IS FABULOUS. It feels like a sign of respect, and I am grateful for that. And they seemed interested in the discussion and AHHHH it was just really cool.

And someone made an appointment to come see me today about some stuff she missed, and that was lovely (I’m one of the freaks who LOVES it when students come to my office hours. YES THAT IS WHY I AM HERE! LET ME HELP YOU)! So, yeah. It was a good day.

Baby Turtles

- Wendy St. John 2 Comments

These are western pond turtles (Emys marmorata), California’s only native freshwater turtle. They are also tiny and adorable right after they hatch (yes I am a scientist I have data to prove this). 😀 These babies were incubated in their nests (at my field site), and the eggs were collected last week, so they could hatch in the lab. They’ll be raised for either one or two years at one of three local zoos, before being released back into the wild.

Western pond turtle. That protrusion on the belly is the turtle’s external yolk; this is normal, and will be absorbed into its body during the next few weeks.
I AM SCIENTIST therefore I record data on paper towels. What, doesn’t everyone do this?
Literally just hatched.
Our incubators. Reasonably low tech, but they get the job done. OH LOOK more paper towels.
Precious babby. They are so tiny when they first hatch. I’d say on average they’re about 4 to 4.5 grams. This one is not even 4 grams (although the one in the first photo was big – almost 6).

End of Field Season

- Wendy St. John 1 Comment

And … as of a few hours ago, my field season for this year has officially ENDED. I didn’t think I was even going to find any turtles today, but then, at the tail end of my last walkthrough, I found this gorgeous lady, JUST after she finished nesting (which is the absolute best time to find them, for a bunch of different reasons). So, YAY Turtle #261! My last turtle of what might be my last official field season on this project. Isn’t she the prettiest princess EVER?

Overall, it was a weird field season. We didn’t find nearly as many nests as in previous years, and we never really had a “peak” – there is usually a week or so when LOADS of turtles are all out on the same days; I think the most we ever had on a single day this year was five. I attribute this mostly to the weather (which alternated between rainy and cold, which they won’t come out to nest in, and EXTREME heat, which they also won’t come out to nest in). But, it was still fun, although I will say I’m glad it’s over. I get a bit tired of camping two or three nights a week.

Baby King Snake

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Few things feel better than a hot shower after three days in the field. It was a good three days, though. Found a total of eight turtles, and the most adorable baby king snake ever. I have never seen a king snake this small before; it was SO TINY AND SO PRECIOUS and really chill about being handled. So beautiful. I’m going to keep checking this location every time I go by; hopefully I’ll be able to see this precious baby again. Photos taken in Lake County, California.

Turtles!

- Wendy St. John 2 Comments

TURTLES! We found four of them last night. PRECIOUS BABBIES! This one is #248. AND SHE IS THE PRETTIEST PRINCESS IN PRINCESS TOWN! She was really adorable, too. She stuck her head out while we were taking photos, and let me rub under her chin. SO...

TURTLES! We found four of them last night. This one is #248. AND SHE IS THE PRETTIEST PRINCESS IN PRINCESS TOWN! She was really adorable, too. She stuck her head out while we were taking photos.

Don’t know if we’ll see any turtles tonight. Weather is all over the place here; we had a MASSIVE thunderstorm last night, and a bit of rain. They won’t come out to nest unless the ground is dry, so if it rained too much at the field site, tonight will be dead up there. But we’ll see. Either way, TURTLES!!!!!!