Caribou (dots on lower right) grazing by moonlight in front of the Brooks Range. I think they are eating the tasty vegetation in the long-term fertilized research plots. This was about 10:30 p.m. last night. Temp was around –5°F.

They are very focused on eating and rarely look up.

This one must have an itch or something.

Speck-sized caribou on a distant ridge grazing in front of the arctic sunset.

Update (5/4): Saw a herd running today.

Caribou beneath the “supermoon”

Update (5/7): Finally got a decent closeup

This is the site after we deployed shadecloth on our five accelerated snowmelt plots.

There are tons of caribou around right now. These guys wandered near our plots, then took off after staring at us for a while.

The deployment went great. The snow looked good and the weather was excellent. If temperatures stay this warm, melt will be quick!

Our lab group just finished reading this book by Josh Schimel. We read two chapters a week and discussed them, which was a nice pace for absorbing the material. It’s easy to read, but there is so much good advice that it’s nice to have time for it to sink in.

Overall, the book is fantastic. It feels like a secret weapon. I can’t recommend it enough for any science writer at any stage. At the book’s Amazon page, I felt similarly to this reviewer:

I have 70 published papers in international, peer-reviewed journals; and I want to go back to each and every one of them and rewrite them with the messages from this book clear in my head and clear to the reader.

Fortunately I found the book earlier than this guy, but I am also eyeing my past papers and realizing how I could have made them much better.

I tweeted:

I’m referring to the animated gif above. Click for the full size version.

I then had the following email exchange with my mom:

Mom: Anthony, what is going on in that graphic? Is it a joke?

Me: lol no joke, it’s actual satellite images of seasonal change in earth surface color throughout the year. Mainly you can see snow extent and when different parts of the world are in their growing seasons.

Mom: Ah ok — so what ten things did you learn? Clearly you need specialized knowledge to interpret that animation.

Challenge accepted! Here are 10 things I did not know before staring at this graphic for a while:

1. While there is permanent snow/ice cover in Antarctica, there is almost no seasonal snow cover in the southern hemisphere.

2. Permanent snow/ice cover near the north pole includes not just Greenland, but also many other large islands in northern Canada like the Sverdrup islands.

3. During the winter, the boreal forest is not as white as the tundra above or the plains below (lower albedo), presumably due to the trees poking out from the snow.

4. In Australia, plants on the northern coast green up in the summer while plants on the southern coast green up in the winter.

5. A huge swath of Brazil has deciduous vegetation (also, Madagascar).

7. The rainforests of South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia that stay green all year round are a lot greener than even peak greenness in the nearby seasonal ecosystems.

8. The permanent snow in the Himalayas is mostly constrained to a thin band where the subcontinent is smashing into Asia.

9. The Amazon river becomes so massive during the rainy season you can see it from space (at least I assume that is what’s going on there).

10. The Nile River delta dries up twice a year. Notice how it flickers more than once per annual cycle in the gif. Here’s an animation that confirms this.

Also, this is more geography, but I had never noticed the Kerguelen Islands before. Looks like it is pretty snowy there in the winter.

And a final observation from an imgur commenter in Britain:

Having read about ggplot2, I knew that it had a more modular system where you can add or subtract different graphical elements such as summary stats or data points at will. So, I tried it for the data I was working on and never looked back.

Here’s my first ggplot2 figure that drew me to switch:

It took minimal effort to learn the ggplot2 system. In addition to the useful modular design, the default approaches to tasks such as automatic legend creation, log axes, and jittering are well done.

While I know an upgrade when I see one, I will also miss lattice since I think it’s a fantastic piece of open source software that was my analysis workhorse for the last eight years. It was also one of the packages that really motivated me to learn R.

Currently the effects of various stresses cannot be deconvoluted in field environments, but storage carbon size likely provides an important point of convergence of various stress pathways. The predictions based on non-structural carbon pools suggest that maintenance of higher storage carbon pools increases the tolerance of sustained stress.

Could understanding plant stress be as simple as this? Probably not, but it’s a nice place to start. We are thinking about doing some preliminary analyses with some of our arctic plants. Our idea is to take plant tissues, enzymatically degrade the starches into sugar and then measure the total sugar pool. We think that our snowmelt acceleration treatment may be stressing the plants. If we do see reductions in nonstructural carbon in those plants, it would be consistent with our hypothesis of plant stress and could provide a nice piece of evidence. The review also mentions that in the future, we may find more sophisticated correlates like VOCs to help us nondestructively assess plant stress level.

The web stuff is almost certainly way out of date; everything else is still great. I particularly recommend the William Cleveland books (the one you can’t see is Visualizing Data). Statistics classes should start with Visualizing Data instead of standard textbooks.

Edward Tufte still does the one day course and it is excellent. Grad students in particular are at a great stage to benefit, so I highly recommend it to them.

It’s been an early spring here in Toledo and indeed throughout the Eastern United States. In Washington DC, the cherry blossoms peaked on March 20, one of the earlier recorded dates.

NPR even ran a fun story about phenology, the study of the timing of biological events like plant flowering dates.

This Magnolia is right around the corner from our house. Nice!

Here’s one about Arctic ground squirrels by another Toolik friend, Michael Sheriff:

And there are a bunch more in the IPY channel. These videos have been viewed dozens of times, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but is probably already more times than all of my previous conference abstracts combined have been read. Cool science projects and youtube seem to go together well. The one-minute length is smart too.

Last weekend, I enjoyed watching If a Tree Falls, a documentary about a group of arsonists in the Earth Liberation Front. The film was both educational and a fascinating story. It illuminates some important aspects to environmental activism in the 1990s and early 2000s and the filmmakers do a great job of answering an obvious question: what were the arsonists thinking? It also has an interesting sort of reverse mystery — we already know whodunnit, but it’s interesting to see who figured it out and how.

One of the fun things for me in watching the story unfold was that I remember seeing news stories about a lot of the events in the film and I feel like I have been on the periphery of the communities in which the events took place. I remember protesting old-growth logging with a youth environmental group when I was in high school. I remember hearing about the “black bloc” anarchists from friends who attended the Seattle WTO protests when I was in college. I remember hearing about the burning of a scientific poplar plantation in Oregon from a guest speaker at CU as a grad student.

While I obviously don’t agree with arson as a tactic, I and many other environmentalists are in the awkward position of agreeing with the arsonists on some of the issues that motivated them. For example, it is in fact tragic and shortsighted to clear-cut the few remaining old growth forests on the west coast. Also, the frenzy to brand people “terrorists” so that prosecutors and law enforcement can claim to have bagged them is worrisome. In the end, I don’t think their misguided approach to addressing these problems has had a huge impact one way or another because it is clear that they are well outside of the mainstream.