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
After weeks of building up base-level knowledge on relevant computer programs, I am finally getting a move on with my project. I wrote my first code using Python (very exciting) which opened a text file containing a list of photo names which I had compiled earlier, found the images associated with the photo names, copied… Read More
Quite a busy week. Still just making intensive spreadsheets to try and weed out the noise in our data. Trying to develop different methods on how we do this in google sheets. Definitely a process. I did find out with my mentor that there is a strong difference in crowdmag survey in a vehicle, on… Read More
This week has had some extreme ups and downs. I was not ready for a week like this. First a good thing. I got to see my reference/ friend. I got to show them the lab I’m working in and they gave me cookies. That was awesome. However, shortly after I managed to ruin two… Read More
This week we spent time ironing out details and testing some of our methods. We met with another lab and found pretty much all of the chemicals we will need to run our tests. Pictured above is Western Catalpa pollen stained in aniline blue, which is a dye that has been used to distinguish between… Read More
This week I was finally able to format my data so that it is now all on the same timescale with the same time intervals. That’s the main thing I’ve been working towards this entire time with all the coding and manipulation of data sets. So what does that mean? It means I can now… Read More
Things are looking really good this week; we now finally have composites that show us where events are primarily taking place. It has been difficult getting the code to work properly, but after a week, things are finally coming together. My mentor has been out all week, so I’m not really sure what all these… Read More
I don’t have any fun picture for you this week, and sadly I don’t have any good news yet either. Turns out it was the pump in the GC that was the problem. Therefore, we had to take the instrument out of the mobile lab and to the manufacturer. Luckily the manufacturer is just in… Read More
What a week of progress! My mentor has been out for the week, so I have essentially been left running the fire simulator and rainfall simulator. We took my own truck (cool) to get soil samples in the field. We were also lucky enough to be joined by Ben Livneh who offered some of his… Read More
I was lucky enough to have spent the last week at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. It was exciting to finally get out into the field and learn some of the processes. One of the sites where we have some germination plots was still covered in snow, so we were not able to make it… Read More
