Speaking at Queen's GAP

I was invited to give a talk as part of the Queen's School of Geography, Archaeology, and Paleoecology Seminar Series at Queen's at the end of January (http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/gap/). As the name implies, this School, and its seminar series, is pretty diverse. My seminar was part of the Environmental Change cluster. I have met some of the people in this cluster during the past 6 months, but certainly not all of them. They seem like a dynamic and friendly group of people. Before the talk, there were sandwiches, cookies, and tea/coffee for everyone. What a lovely tradition!

My talk, titled "Increasing understanding of environmental change: Quantifying multi-scaled relationships between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems" was in the Elmwood Building, next door to the building my office is in. My talk was well-attended and well-received by a mixture of students and staff. I had a lot of interesting questions after the talk and look forward to interacting with people from this cluster for the next 6 months.

Special thanks to Dr. Paula Reimer for hosting me.

Playing with data in FL

During early January, I spent a week in Florida with my CSI-Limnology colleagues. For those of you who don't know about CSI-Limnology (www.csilimnology.org), we are an interdisciplinary team of researchers who have compiled lake and landscape data for thousands of the northeastern-most 17 U.S. states in order to better understand how lakes are responding to changes in land use and climate. We have named our database LAGOS (LAke GeOSpatial) and the lake data look something like:

Our team includes researchers from across central and eastern U.S. (and even one who person who lives in the UK), so every year we meet somewhere for a week to work together. This year, we met at the Archbold Biological Station (http://www.archbold-station.org/) in Venus, FL.

Lake Annie on the Archbold Biological Station property. The Director, Dr. Hilary Swain,
took our group there one evening to tell us about the Station and this really unique FL lake. 

Most of CSI-Limnology

Loving the break from our conference room (below)!

We are working on a variety of publications that use data from LAGOS, and we spent a lot of the week conducting data analysis and interpreting results for these publications.

We also had fun getting to know everyone, including our new team members. Below are a couple of pictures from our mid-week half-day excursion kayaking on Fisheating Creek, which flows into Lake Okeechobee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisheating_Creek). We saw SO many spiders, snakes, and vultures!

We had a very productive and fun week in FL! I'm already looking forward to our next workshop.

Note added 1/31/14: One of the CSI Limno grad students, Samantha Oliver, also blogged about our week in FL. Check her great post out: http://limnology.wisc.edu/blog/csi-limnology-team-building-crucial-for-team-science/