Bird vs. Fish

MN Ornithologists’ Union Young Birders’ Committee

I’m pleased to have been asked to serve on the MOU Young Birders’ Committee! We’re generously defining “young” as 18-40, but not without precedent (Erikson 1963). Our overarching goal is to improve participation of those of us in this age group in conservation-related organizations, which in our specific case is MOU. Conveniently, my friend who […]

Getting Started: Learning How to Observe Birds

Meta-learning As with any skill, there’s a certain element to “learning how to learn” to observe birds. You’ll see what I mean if you invest time in this new hobby. You start to learn what marks to look for and where to look, or how to listen. You pick up how to watch and anticipate […]

My Annoying Climate Download Process

Here’s a summary of my week: I needed mass amounts of data from the NetcdfSubset portal, but it was too much for the HTTP server to handle (they set a cap) with just selecting the products and spatial extent to download. So, instead they returned to me a URI that needed to be passed through […]

Spatial Information Already in BBS Data

You can get some good information from the BBS site on routes, etc. but you may need to convert it to a more friendly format (i.e. a CSV file). Once you have your dataframes linked up, you can spatially subset based on some of the data that has already been assigned per BBS route… BBS […]

What is a NetCDF?

Perhaps the strength of NetCDF files is that you don’t have to download them, because multiple people can access it at once?

Installing NetCDF on Ubuntu & Cygwin

To install netcdf on Ubuntu, I first had to install curl and then update the versioning in this script. Related, in the latest version update, I had to make a tweak to the script based on the filename and unzipped folder, which now differ. To install netcdf on Cygwin, I searched in the full list […]

Forest Hill Cemetery Association Park

Today, I explored a few unmarked trails off Vermilion Rd. I’m still not sure if they have names, but they were behind the cemetery.

How Best to Download Climate Data?

I’ll be working on gathering this data for the Dakotas (bounding box: 49 N, 42 S, -96 E, -105 W), and then summarizing it to the level of sample blocks they created earlier in the project. I used NetcdfSubset but the request is too big for their on-line retrieval system. Instead, they suggested I use nccopy with […]

Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory – Snively Trail

Today, I walked the Snively trail and came back along the spur of the Superior Hiking trail.

NSF Macro-systems Grant Meeting

We had a meeting here today of some of the co-PI’s from other universities, so it was nice to finally meet some of the people who have been involved with the grant. Besides our WETLANDSCAPE group, I had never met anyone outside our institute on the grant before today. It helped me get a feel […]