Archive for September, 2011
Thursday, September 29th, 2011
There is a news piece in Nature today about the effects of the stimulus (ARRA) on science.
One of the biggest legacies of the science stimulus, however, will be that thousands of students have stayed in science longer than they might otherwise have done. "ARRA has provided postdocs and graduate students ...
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Friday, September 23rd, 2011
Nice website put up by the Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS) compiling all of the different seasonality projects that were funded by the NSF request for proposals that included the project I am currently working on. Should be a nice way for us to track publications as they come ...
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Thursday, September 22nd, 2011
Yesterday in the Weintraub Lab meeting, we discussed a great paper by Zoe Cardon and Daniel Gage from 2006 Annual Reviews. This paper ties together a lot of interesting concepts in soil ecology and we had a great discussion about rhizosphere processes and methods for testing these ideas.
Most of our discussion ...
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Monday, September 19th, 2011
Our arctic experiment has two crossed factors, snowmelt acceleration and air temperature warming. We measure the effects of those treatments multiple times on a number of variables over the course of the summer, creating a repeated measures data set. Classic repeated measures ANOVA in R is easy to do. There ...
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Sunday, September 18th, 2011
A few links here that I wanted to share but didn't end up writing posts about...
Op-ed about nitrogen pollution by Jim Galloway.
Debate about the ethics and philosophy of invasive species management.
Awesome photos from Greenland in The Atlantic.
Cool new paper on decomposition by my friend and fellow Toolik postdoc Jennie McLaren
Yet more ways ...
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Saturday, September 17th, 2011
I hiked the 16.2 mile "Scout Trail" today at Oak Openings Metropark. It was a nice long hike and I saw some cool stuff like this shelf fungus. Not the best picture ever, but a neat specimen. Lots of neat fungi out at this time of year.
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Thursday, September 15th, 2011
Sounds kind of disturbing, but apparently 'data munging' is the name for a task I do all the time: taking raw data and converting it into a form that is usable for analysis. I usually call this data processing, but now that I know 'munging'...
For my munging, I tend to ...
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Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
Back in Toledo this week! Toolik was great fun as always, but it is good to be home again.
I just finished graphing some data showing the effect of our snowmelt acceleration treatment on soil temperature. The fabric (shadecloth) was on the ground for 8 days, creating a two-week acceleration in ...
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Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
Toolik Lake is already looking a lot different than two weeks ago. The snow will probably melt out before it sticks for good, but winter is coming soon. (Full panorama here)
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Tuesday, September 6th, 2011
Over the last couple days, we packed up our instruments and grabbed some final samples. We enjoyed a fitting end for the season today with the first snowfall of the fast approaching arctic winter. We roll out of Toolik on Thursday. Here are some photos of two of our plots (May ...
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Thursday, September 1st, 2011
A couple of cool recent papers on N cycling, both based on isotopic data:
(1) Santoro et al. show that N2O from the ocean appears to be from ammonia-oxidizing archaea, counter to previous assumptions that it was from bacterial nitrification and denitrification:
Marine N2O sources to the atmosphere are estimated to represent ...
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