Land Acknowledgments

Recent talks I have attended mentioned indigenous histories at their research sites. This is a positive form of provenance not just of the site or place but of the sense of its ecology. Nonetheless, it has been proposed that talk is cheap. There at least five major implications of this premise.

Acknowledge but propose a solution for those lands to better recognize the diversity of peoples associated with its present and past.
Similar to prepping a data management plan, prepare a land and research provenance management plan that includes sharing and communicating results to current and past stakeholders within the region.
Provide the audience or readers with an opportunity to contribute to this recognition process. This can include mechanisms such as an NPO or charity to support associated with the land use culture and peoples, a mailing address or contact details for more information, a link to additional resources or the site for deeper reflection, and finally lead by example and mention how your research process incorporated provenance.
Revisit the culture, history, and ecology at the end of the talk by reconnecting with its peoples. In many of the systems we work in as a team in Central California, Ephedra californica is a foundation plant species. This plant has a long history of use and management by many. Mention this as a key connector to the ecology that we now study. These ephedra parklands reflect many processes of change including active management.
The written word is powerful. In the standard ‘study site’ description included in the Methods section of field ecology papers, consider a statement describing and citing work on the indigenous people and culture that supported your study site.

Campus tree project 2020

Two super experiments.

Exotic animal responses to trees and disturbance.
Individual tree and patch-level dynamic responses to disturbance.
Post hoc synthesis and contrast of interaction pathways.

Sample academic plans

Table, list, freeform, calendar, all good. Match your modality or even use more than one mechanism to support your journey this Fall and beyond.

Journey rabbit

Learn

Read Spatio-temporal statistics with R

Read Advanced R (skim some bits, functions)

Write

Rangeland brome papers x2

Scientific synthesis paper

Editorial on distributed learning

Dream on – notes on how to do experiments into paper

Magic paper with Mario

Synthesis papers with Mario, Nargol, and Malory

Work

Teach BIOl3250

Review apps for Diol grad committee

Support team in papers and planning

Other

Seminars on experimental science

Connect with USAID folks

Grants

Mozilla

YUFA to write a book

Journey army ants

1) Apply for NSERC and other grants

2) Readings list for PhD project

3) Select committee Members

4) Come up with a few thesis questions

a. Possibly run a meta/Systematic review (Would need to make a super clear one though)

b. Continue with density? Maybe make areas with a bunch of replicate shrubs and see what happens. Or cut some shrubs down and see what happens

c. Maybe look at how density of shrubs has an impact on invasive grasses?

d. Maybe look at one specific animal species and compare density of that specific species to density of shrubs?

e. Or maybe take a completely new route on thing.

5) Brainstorm possible field projects for PhD (When we are going, manipulative for experiments, timeframes, etc.)

6) Work on posters and other outside projects/research papers

Journey salamander

Read “Fundamentals of Statistics” Aug 2020

Research possible committee members and reach out Oct 2020

Select a committee member Dec 2020

Come up with a thesis question Dec 2020

Field Work/Data Collection Apr 2020 – Aug 2020

Data Analysis Fall 2021

Reading list for research Winter 2020

Take remote sensing course? Winter 2020

Thesis Writing Winter 2022

Hugh C. Morris Experiential Learning Fellowship application February 15, 2021

Scholarship/fellowship research Oct 1, 2020

Ontario Graduate Scholarships (OGS) application Dec 1, 2020

Journey chipmunk

Not including how ongoing work is structured.. mostly deadlines, hopeful progress and some milestones

October

Decide on topic

Find committee

Submit NSERC/OGS application

Transfer final insect survey specimens to ethanol

Some progress on synthesis

November

Come up with a review/meta

Come up with 1or 2 new chapters on top of lizard diet

Progress report

Mail first run of samples to Mark

December

Field planning

Resurrect and write-up spatial veg finally

Apply for permits if needed

Work through a review

Compile taxonomist list

Jan

Family level data input

Second round of specimens sent to Mark

Review data extracted – what is the story?

Do I need to get additional data?

Get into grad level GIS course

Feb

Learn simulations

March

Research evaluation meeting

Submit thesis proposal to FGS

April

Submit interim report to BLM

My Q:

How focused does a topic need to be? How related are chapters?

How do expectations differ for phd from msc

Journey hellgrammite

1) Apply for NSERC and other grants

2) Readings list for PhD project

3) Select committee Members

4) Come up with a few thesis questions

a. Possibly run a meta/Systematic review (Would need to make a super clear one though)

b. Continue with density? Maybe make areas with a bunch of replicate shrubs and see what happens. Or cut some shrubs down and see what happens

c. Maybe look at how density of shrubs has an impact on invasive grasses?

d. Maybe look at one specific animal species and compare density of that specific species to density of shrubs?

e. e. Or maybe take a completely new route on thing.

5) Brainstorm possible field projects for PhD (When we are going, manipulative for experiments, timeframes, etc.)

6) Work on posters and other outside projects/research papers

Journey capybara

Largest focus on teaching for the fall term. Followed by restarting the greenhouse experiment and finishing seeds in October. Two papers are currently submitted and going through review, with another manuscript in preparation.

Journey kangaroo

-September’s end: finalize rough research questions and ideas to explore for PhD (human-wildlife conflict, trampling, and facilitation)-October 20th: confirm committee members-October: Collect reading list, get seeds and scale from lab to continue seed allocation side project-October 15th: Confirm all AIF Climate Activist Videos online-November: Work through reading list & submit grants (National Geogrpahic Explorer Grant, MITACS?, other small grants). Seed allocation data analyses-December 1st: first progress report-December: Continue working through reading lists, add to lists as necessary. -December’s end: Finish full draft of seed allocation paper-January: Determine 2 cognates and begin drafting cognate literature reviews-March: Finish up first full draft of proposal (due beginning of May)

Fall 2020 goals

Personal

Stay healthy.
Be safe.
Connect with team.
Learn something new.

Deliverables

Academic plan.
MSc and PhD committees built and summoned.
Read a pile of papers on existing focus and begin a new direction too.
Proposal.
Complete and submit outstanding synthesis papers.
Book and schedule progress reports.
Prep deck and present at report meeting.

Strategy

Set hard and soft deadlines.
Populate google calendar.
Identify stepping stones to larger goals and make lists breaking each deliverable down.
Select someone to be accountable to.
Identify collaborations and update them on stepping stones.
Keep track of progress (Gantt charts, notes, meetings, GitHub repos with issues to track).
Plan breaks from the screen.

get the lands out so you have the mana to spend

Seven steps for turning camera trap photos into useful datasets: manual processing workflow

Seven magical steps into a dataframe.

By Nargol Ghazian

This is a summary of the protocol I have been using for that past few months to process all the amazing camera trap photos from the Mojave National Preserve and the Carrizo National Monument. After reading a few papers on cam trap processing and exploring the CamtrapR package, the best approach would be to create your datasets manually as no other program is able to automatically detect animals for you. This method also ensures that you obtain the best dataset for the statistical analysis you wish to perform. This seven step guide should give you a quick rundown on how to get started with processing and maintaining a good workflow.

Start by naming your columns as below. These heading are best suited for this project but yours can include more columns.

1.Year	We are working on the 2017 images
2.Region	MNP is Mojave and CNM is Carrizo
3.Site	Mojave or Carrizo
4.Calendar date	The date the picture was taken in dd-mm-yr. I like to do the pictures belonging to the same date for each photo rep in order. If the date is wrong, don’t worry too much, just do it all as one for the last date of the particular week you are working on
5.Microsite	Carrizo is shrub or open, 3 weeks for each. Mojave is Buckhorn or Larea, also 3 weeks for each.
6.Day	This goes in a 1,2,3..n order
7.Rep	This refers to the camera trap station. There are 10 stations per microsite. For example you might have four pictures for the same day in station #2 of open, so you would write 2 four times: 2,2,2,2 each corresponding to an image
8.Photo Rep	A continuous number starting at 1 and continuing until you’ve finished processing all your pictures for the particular site
9.Animal	The animal in a hit photo. The most common are rat, rabbit, squirrel, fox, lizard and sometimes bird. There are times where you might have to guess. If it’s really hard then write ‘unidentifiable’. If it’s a false hit leave it blank.
10.Animal. Capture	binary 0 = false hit, 1 = animal present
11.Time block	Look at the timestamp. Is the photo taken at night, noon, afternoon or in the morning. If the timestamp is wrong, guess based on the darkness or lightness.
12.Night. Day	Based on whether it’s dark or light.
13.Actual time	Actual time written on the photo. Let’s hope it’s the correct timestamp J
14.Observations	If you see absolutely anything interesting in the photo, note it! Otherwise leave this column blank. I usually write ‘x2’ or ‘x3’ if there is more than one animal in the photo. Sometimes I write ‘eyes visible’ if it’s dark and you can only tell the presence of the animal from its shining eyes (rats usually)
15.Temp of positive	This is noted on the picture in Fahrenheit or Celsius. Whatever unit is shown, note it in your meta-data. If you’ve been working with one unit, and a certain photo rep has a different one, just use a converter to convert to the units you’ve been using for that particular photo rep.
16.Week	This is either 1, 2 or 3 since there are only 3 weeks per microsite. This column is super important because sometimes the datestamps are wrong but at least the week of sampling is correct

*Note: The only time we actually fill in anything for columns 9 and 11-15 is when we have a “hit” and there is an actual animal.

Since each row corresponds to a particular image, I liked to start with at least 100,000 just so I don’t have to go back and paste more rows. You can delete the extra rows when you’re done processing. For year, region, site and microsite write the correct label in the cell right below your column heading. Select the cell, then using control+C input the number of cells you want by using a colon in the area below the clipboard in Excel. For examples if you are in row B, it would be written as B2:B100000 then click enter.
You can use the above method for the date as well. I input the date as I go along. For example if the photos start on 2017-05-22 I paste 100 thousand of that date. Obviously this is far too many, so once all the images for that particular date is finished, I control+C from the last cell and enter the new day for up to 100 thousand and so on until you are finished for the week and can delete the extra cells.
Days work exactly like calendar dates.
When it comes to rep, select all the image belonging to a particular date in your particular station of cam trap files and click properties. This tells you how many images you have for that date, in that station. Use the above method discussed to paste as many cells needed for that station. Keep a calculator handy because you would need to determine your ending cell by adding the number of images to the current cell you’re on.
Photo rep is just a continuous number, as already mentioned in the chart. It’s basically the total of all the images processed for either Carrizo or Mojave. Use the ‘fill’ button in excel for numbers in a series to do this step.
If you come across a cool photo, make sure to copy and paste it in a different folder. This includes two animals together, animals fighting, clear photos of animals etc. (use your judgement). Do not cut and paste!

Determining Regional Gradient

Ephedra regional gradient

My biggest project examines positive interactions along a regional gradient of continentality. The immediate question though is what is continentality? What abiotic and biotic variables change along this gradient in addition to plant-plant interactions. When we initially constructed this gradient the two main considerations were aridity and cold stress. For plants in the Deserts of California these are two very important considerations. After two years of conducting this experiment, I had very different climate profiles during the seasons. The most striking was the differences in my plant phytometers between the two seasons. In 2015-2016 growing season, the majority of my plants were present in the San Joaquin Desert. This desert is generally colder and wetter than the more continental Mojave Desert to the east. However, in the 2016-2017 the San Joaquin Desert sites had few plants of my chosen phytometer relative to the abundant Mojave Desert sites. All my plants were present at all my sites at some point, suggesting that this gradient shifts with inter-annual variability. Let’s take a look at what some of that looks like:

San Joaquin Desert year

The 2015-2016 shown in black had similar temperatures on average relative to the 2016-2017 growing season (in grey). The precipitation patterns though were different between years. These sites form a parabola with distances from the ocean. Sites closest to the ocean and most inland have the highest precipitation, while sites in the middle are the least. Overall the 2016-2017 season saw significantly more rainfall. Sites in the 2015-2016 season were extremely arid. For instance, Barstow and my site along Hwy40 saw as little as 30 mm of rainfall. The low abundance of my phytometer in the Mojave sites for that season is therefore likely because of low rainfall amounts. However, the San Joaquin sites has similar rainfall between years so then why so few plants in the 2016-2017. I believe this has to do with the cold stress factor:

Precipitation in mm (black) and temperature in C° (red) during the 2015-2016 growing season for the San Joaquin desert (top) and Mojave Desert (bottom).

Precipitation in mm (black) and temperature in C° (red) during the 2016-2017 growing season for the San Joaquin desert (top) and Mojave Desert (bottom).

Mojave Desert year

Both of these seasons had similar precipitation and temperature patterns. The patterns were also similar between the two deserts, but the noticeable difference that I believe contributed to low plant abundance in the San Joaquin in 2016-2017 is temperature. The year before had warmer temperatures from January onward, which is a key period for plant development. In January 2017 following the majority of rainfall there was a long freeze period of approximately 5 days, followed by another cold period with freezing temperatures end of February. This pattern was much warmer in 2016 and is why I believe cold stress negatively affected plants in San Joaquin Desert for 2017. On the other hand, the Mojave saw significantly ore precipitation and cooler temperatures that all contributed to greater plant abundance.

Slicing through this climate data was interesting and challenging because of all the different ways to summarize variables. Using season means collapses a significant amount of the information and can make conclusions more difficult to derive. I am primed and excited now to dig into the plant responses!

Rules-of-thumb for collaboration

Rules-of-thumb for reuse of data and plots

1. If you use unpublished data from someone else, even if they are done with it, invite them to be a co-author.

2. If you use a published dataset, at the minimum contact authors, and depending on the purpose of the reuse, consider inviting them to become a co-author. Check licensing.

3. If you use plots initiated by another but in a significantly different way/for a novel purpose, invite them to be co-author (within a reasonable timeframe).

4. If you reuse the experimental plots for the exact same purpose, offer the person that set it up ‘right of first refusal’ as first author (within a fair period of time such as 1-2 years, see next rule).

5. If adding the same data to an experiment, first authorship can shift to more recent researchers that do significant work because the purpose shifts from short to long-term ecology. Prof Turkington (my PhD mentor) used this model for his Kluane plots. He surveyed for many years and always invited primary researchers to be co-authors but not first. They often declined after a few years.

6. Set a reasonable authorship embargo to give researchers that have graduated/changed focus of profession a generous chance to be first authors on papers. This can vary from 8 months to a year or more depending on how critical it is to share the research publicly. Development pressures, climate change, and extinctions wait for no one sadly.

Rules-of-thumb for collaborative writing

1. Write first draft.

2. Share this draft with all potential first authors so that they can see what they would be joining.

3. Offer co-authorship to everyone that appropriately contributed at this juncture and populate the authorship list as firmly as possible.

4. Potential co-authors are invited to refuse authorship but err on the side of generosity with invitations.

5. Do revisions in serial not parallel. The story and flow gets unduly challenging for everyone when track changes are layered.

How to use colour in manuscripts

untitled

I thought this was a very helpful guide on using colour in figures. There are a few rules, but one comment from the whole document stands out. “If colour serves a purpose, but something other than colour would do the job better, avoid using it”.

http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/rules_for_using_color.pdf

Here are the simple rules:

1. If you want different objects of the same color in a table or graph to look
the same, make sure that the background—the color that surrounds
them—is consistent.

2. If you want objects in a table or graph to be easily seen, use a background
color that contrasts sufficiently with the object.

3. Use color only when needed to serve a particular communication goal.

4. Use different colors only when they correspond to differences of meaning
in the data.

5. Use soft, natural colors to display most information and bright and/or dark
colors to highlight information that requires greater attention.

6. When using color to encode a sequential range of quantitative values,
stick with a single hue (or a small set of closely related hues) and vary
intensity from pale colors for low values to increasingly darker and brighter
colors for high values.

7. Non-data components of tables and graphs should be displayed just
visibly enough to perform their role, but no more so, for excessive salience
could cause them to distract attention from the data.

8. To guarantee that most people who are colorblind can distinguish groups
of data that are color coded, avoid using a combination of red and green in
the same display.

9. Avoid using visual effects in graphs.

temp

Filazzola 2016 updates

Its 2016 whoa!

I enjoyed a solid break at the end of December but am looking forward to getting back into the grind. There are some crucial things I would like to tackle before my progress reports:

RDM paper – I have finalized the statistics and need to get back to the writing. I am reading the literature to get a better idea on how to properly structure an animal distributions paper. Something I’m not accustom to.
Field work – Gradient – I’m very excited for this experiment. It is been raining in California so am hoping for some heavy germination. The rain patterns have somewhat followed my gradient pattern as well with my more coastal sites seeing higher precipitation. About time the rain came
Field work – Exclosures – I am reconducting my exclosure experiment and building 60 new plots. Recreating the experiment I did two years ago in the worse drought, now in heavy rains will be the perfect contrast. It shall be interesting to see which way the trends flip
Other stuff? – There is a lot but two primary ones I need to get done is finalize the Ecography paper before the due date and come up with a workflow for the facilitation ecologists who want to write a synthesis paper.

Overall, please with the way my winter is shaping up. Cali is a lot colder than it has been in the past, but lots of rain makes for a happy ecologist! I am also going to try to shoot a video short during my time in the field. Stay tuned for all the gory details! temp

Nomenclature for pollinator and animal stills and videos

Given that an increasing proportion of Big Data globally are not in alphanumeric formats, nomenclature with appropriate semantic tags are critical to enable retrieval and use of videos and pictures. In ecology, animal cameras are a popular tool to ‘trap’ or capture vertebrates in the field. In our lab, we use these extensively for this purpose but also use small, HD cameras to record pollinators and flying invertebrates (description of methodology: From birds to bees: applying video observation techniques to invertebrate pollinators). However, as we explore sharing these data online via youtube or as data packages with new data journals, we have come to realize that even with appropriate, well-articulated meta-data, file names are important and must be descriptive. Zooniverse as a platform has many animal-cam projects now and you are typically logged in to collaborate so perhaps it less critical. In all other domains however, it is likely useful to have file names that support rapid assessment of ecological context (maybe even for the kitten clips too).

We are discussing this format now but would love additional input on nomenclature – i.e. from systematic nomenclature domains.

year-site-microsite-rep.extensions seems like a reasonable starting point. There are many other options though.

ecoblender

community ecology & fun ideas

ideas