Coming up to the final week and I’m feeling pretty good about where I’m at. Definitely not excited about the presentation but I feel like I will have enough time to practice with my mentor group and with the cohort and I should do well… I hope. I spent the last week trying to finalize… Read More

This summer is really zooming on by! Now that my field season has gotten into full swing, time seems to be moving much faster. I’m making progress with R Studio, which is super helpful as I continue to shape and analyze the temperature and occupancy data. Looking forward to presenting my results, as they’re not… Read More

So for the past week I’ve been here in Alaska collecting samples of moss and oh boy has it been an interesting learning experience on how fieldwork can go wrong. Because the grant my mentor in working on is a collaboration of various labs, in order to collect samples for this a lot of organization… Read More

What a busy week this has been! We arrived back at RMBL on Monday the 8th and have gotten a lot of work done. This time around, we are lucky enough to have two others on our team, Andrea and Jane. We have all been putting in full days in the field collecting demography and… Read More

This entire week, Katy and I have been adapting a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) to be trained with our data (lots and lots of drone images of the Chalk Cliffs catchment). Yesterday evening, I set the script to run 300 epochs (which means it’s running through its training process with the data 300 times)… Read More

So much time in the field this week! After spending a windy / rainy Monday setting traps on the West Knoll of Niwot Ridge, we had our hands full of pikas on the first day of trapping season! I learned how to assemble and position traps in the field yesterday, which involves a lot of… Read More

This was a busy field week. We spent a lot of time up at Niwot taking phenological data at our sites. We have found a considerable amount of flower buds, which is exciting! Also, this week was a lot of prep for RMBL. I spent some time figuring out how much reagent we will need… Read More

After days of annotating images of the debris flow site at Chalk Cliffs, I finally got to visit for myself! To beat the afternoon storms, Katy, Jess, and I got a 5 AM start, piled our packs into the Subaru, and started down to Buena Vista, Colorado. With drone and batteries in tow, we made… Read More

Spent so much time in the field this week! Finally got out to a few of my plots up on the ridge, visited some of Ashley’s sites, and got to bask in the rambunctious presence of sooooo many pikas! Collected some occupancy data at three, but the majority are still under snowpack. I even had… Read More

I have begun the PCR process on my more than 40 isolations and am beginning the data analysis process, which is surprisingly really fun. Probably because I enjoy organizing data and keeping tables (you should see my monthly budgets). This week (after today) marks the end of my culturing and the beginning of the more… Read More