Avian Ecologist

Best Computing Practices: Climate

This is Part 1 of “Best Computing Practices for Ecologists,” laid out with ecology themes & analogies! I wanted to start with what “climate zone” you live in, and where you might be happiest as an organism. In this analogy, I’m talking about your operating system. This is where you start interfacing with a computer: no […]

Best Computing Practices: Landscape

This is Part 2 of the “Best Computing Practices for Ecology” series. I’ve just been watching the R revolution sweep ecology (one I’m very much a part of, too) and want to shed light on some other aspects of the “computing ecosystem” in ecological terms…insofar as I can make the wordplay work! So, here is […]

Butterfly Species that Migrate Here

Paul asked me this, and I thought it was a nice excuse to hash out butterfly life history strategies. The answer, though, is not simple, so I’m going to define it in the context of our locality. We actually have a good reference point to split migration vs. hibernation, since it’s easier to sort out […]

Butterflies: Last Week of May

These butterflies peak this week in Wisconsin! A good reason to go looking for butterflies on this holiday weekend. Frigga fritillary Freija fritillary red-disked alpine dusted skipper

A Primer on Crashing INLA Models

This post was originally written 09/28/2015 copied from my old blog. There seems to be at least something to the fact that the models seem harder to fit with bigger data. Our theory is that INLA crashes the model isn’t a good fit. Luckily, if you search “crash,” I’m far from the only one who has had this […]

Best Computing Practices: Ecosystem

This is Part 3 of “Best Computing Practices for Ecologists.” If you’ve been following the other parts, I’m going to focus on an “Arctic ecosystem” here: your Linux install on your P.C. Let’s say you have that Linux dual boot (or full boot). What are/should be the features of your ecosystem? bash: this is your […]

May Butterflies

These butterflies “peak” in Wisconsin approx. May 19-25. In other counties, I might be lucky to find some of the duskywings, which as a group peak in the later half of May. West Virginia white hoary elfin frosted elfin mottled duskywing Persius duskywing cobweb skipper

Effective “Kickoff” of Butterfly Season!

I mentioned a northern species that emerges early up north, but aside from that, this week really seems to be the first big “push” of butterflies! I made this list of dates from the histograms on Wisconsin Butterflies. I went through every species, and picked its first seasonal “peak,” and then listed it by its […]

Learning How to Use Containers (Docker)

if I close the terminal window, the connection stays on (i.e. I can still access my local Datalab site via the browser) it doesn’t stay indefinitely (maybe closes when I shut down?) so I can’t perpetually access that site to reconnect after you’ve installed and setup the workspace (from Google instructions)… export GCP_PROJECT_ID=YOUR_PROJECT_ID export CONTAINER_IMAGE_NAME=gcr.io/earthengine-project/datalab-ee:latest […]

From Nemesis to Lifer: Yellow Rail

Tonight, we went to McGregor Marsh, the best spot in the state to find yellow rails. I’ve been many a time before, eventually deciding last summer that someone must be playing a colossal practical joke on me and that those birds weren’t actually there. 😉 Yellow rail are hard to find; in fact, I’d say […]