Here are some of the pitfalls you might run into if you use the Geospatial Modelling Environment (GME): 1st warning: GME summarizes variables by appending them to your shapefile’s attribute table. If you don’t want all those added columns in your “one good input file,” first make a copy of your input file then use […]

This is the week to look for Arctic skipper in WI! The farthest south these butterflies get is Columbia Co., so we’ll see if our naturalist adventures take us there soon.

I use the “traditional” command line tool, grep, for much of my regexp work in R. formulas <- readLines(“full_models.txt”) fragstats <- grep(“IJI|SIDI|IJI_water|LPI|SIDI”, formulas, perl=TRUE, value=TRUE)

Now that the camera is back on the ground, I’m getting mostly chipmunk photos, which is unsurprising given that it’s on a seed pile behind a hedge in Madison, WI. I’m trying to figure out how to get the most useful info from the photos I have. Not that identification is much a challenge with this species, […]

Forgive my detour back to the “dark side”: this is yet again something I needed to get done quickly, so I did it the way I already know. For this example in Python, you’ll need… import arcpy from arcpy import env from arcpy.sa import * import os A few reminders when scripting… make sure your […]

For each species, there’s essentially a weighted range map produced with the BBS data. You can download the shape file for any species, which is a grid with abundance indices in each cell. This is useful if you need to work with distributions of species for spatial analyses. For my purposes, I determined which Bird […]

I’m still not happy with how much I rely on closed-source software like ArcGIS. Yet, I don’t do enough GIS to feel like I can invest the time to learn something new. Also, open-source alternatives are hard to get started with IMO. That sense comes from dabbling, and admittedly not a concerted effort. But, it’s […]

I put the camera on the ground in the backyard, and captured my quarry: white-crowned sparrow! The most I counted at a time was 4 individuals. These birds looked closest to the eastern taiga subspecies, but I wonder if we might get individuals from the inter-grade zone. Probably the thing I love most about the feeder cam is […]

What else would you expect, then, but a house sparrow? They’re now abundant across the U.S., and not many people’s favorite birds (here) because they evict cavity nesting birds. Yet, I get many pictures of them! As a conservationist, I’m guilty of just being annoyed by them and wanting them gone. As an ecologist, though, […]

I run all my BBS analyses on our Linux servers, so I’ve picked up some bash scripting tricks along the way. If you have a screen you want to kill (and there are multiple running), first find its name and then kill it. screen -ls screen -X -S [session # you want to kill] kill […]