Musings, Explorations, and Announcements

I gave a short talk today to the [Davis R Users’ Group] about ggplot. This what I presented. Additional resources at the bottom of this post ggplot is an R package for data exploration and producing plots. It produces fantastic-looking graphics and allows one to slice and dice one’s data in many different ways. Comparing with base graphics (This example from Stack Overflow) First, get the package: install.packages("ggplot2") library(ggplot2) Let’s say we wanted to plot some two-variable data, changing color and shape by the sub-category of data.

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This week I pinged the Davis Forest Biology Students’ Association and my twitter friends for recommendations for forest-specific journals. Here are their responses: Forest Ecology and Management Canadian Journal of Forest Research Journal of Forestry Tropical Ecology (not forest specific, but heavy on tropical forest research) Biotropica (ditto) The first two on the list got the most votes. I was actually surprised that there weren’t more. Sometimes I read The Forestry Chronicle, but that’s more of a manager’s trade journal.

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My advisor Alan Hastings and colleague Alison Marklein have put together a great seminar this quarter on theoretical appraoches to nutrient flows and ecological stochiometry. I’m excited because this bridges my own current work, in population modeling, with my undergraduate training in ecosystem- and biogiochemical-based ecology. I’ll try to blog about the papers we read as we go, and I’ve created a public Mendeley Group where I’ll be posting the readings.

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Panelists at the floodplains workshop. Left to right: Ron Unger, Dave Shpak, Richard Howitt, Petrea Marchand, Elizabeth Andrews, Paul Brunner, and J. D. Wikert. See below for affiliations and titles We had a fantastic workshop on Floodplain Restoration on September 14 as part of our work with UC Davis’ REACH IGERT program. Here are my notes: Geologist and prolific floodplain-er Jeff Mount introduced the day with an overview of the scale of changes in the Central Valley and the types of challenges that had to be overcome to produce functioning floodplains.

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Melinda D. Smith of Colorado State spoke this week at Davis’s Ecology and Evolution seminar. These are my rough notes from the talk. Any errors or misrepresentations are my own. Also, a shorter version of the talk is available as a PDF here Melinda’s general framework: Ecological implications of global change. How human caused global changes (climate, biochemical modification, land use), ultimately change community structure and function. Grasslands (inc. steppe, tundra, savanna, and scrublands) cover 40% of earth’s surface.

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