About DownWithTime

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Jack Williams.  I am working as a member of the PalEON project, a group of nearly 60 interdisciplinary researchers across North America and Europe. I finished my Ph.D at Simon Fraser University with Rolf Mathewes, studying Holocene climate in British Columbia using pollen-based climate reconstruction models.

Most Recent Publication:

Pellatt, M., Goring, S., Bodtker, K., Cannon, A. 2012. Using a Down-Scaled Bioclimate Envelope Model to Determine Long-Term Temporal Connectivity of Garry oak (Quercus garryana) Habitat in Western North America: Implications for Protected Area Planning. Environmental Management. DOI: 10.1007/s00267-012-9815-8

It is a mistake to eliminate government science. Part II

In part one of this post I talked about the fundamental importance of federal research.  I’d like to talk a little bit more about the implications of contracting out research.  These implications depend largely on how that contracting is performed.  While we might expect contracting of federal science to universities to provide a sort of status quo situation, this is not entirely the case.  

It is a mistake to eliminate government science. Part I

Figure 1. From the Department of Fisheries and Oceans website, an image of one of the Experimental Lakes in northern Ontario.

UPDATE:  If you are interested in efforts to save the Experimental Lakes Research Station please visit this site.  Part II of this post is here.

There has been coverage lately about the elimination of many government supported research programs in Canada.  The Experimental Lakes Research Area (coverage here, here, here and here)  is the latest in a string of cuts aimed at reducing the federal deficit.  Much of the decision rests on the idea that scientific work can be outsourced from government to Universities (as it already is through funding arrangements between researchers and NSERC) or to private contractors.  Much of this discussion will focus on ecology and ecological research since that is my field of interest.  I will expand a bit and discuss the state of affairs in biomedical research, a field where there is considerable privatization of research in Part II (link to come).

We’ve been added to NEONnotes’ blog roll!

NEONnotes, the blog for NEON, has added this humble little blog to their blog roll, along with a bunch of other great blogs and twitter feeds. Check them all out right now. You have no excuse!

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Alpha Channel

This is a short post about graphs with lots of data.  If you’re going to make a scatter plot, and there are lots of overlapping points use the alpha channel.  The alpha channel allows you to add the appearance of transparency to your plotting objects in R, meaning plots with multiple overlapping objects are resolved a little bit better.

Choosing the right acronym for your project.

In my first thesis publication I propose a method for pollen-based climate reconstruction using non-metric multidimensional scaling and generalized additive models, called (clunkily) NMDS/GAM.  Follow this up with a talk by Jim Ramsay where he discussed the fact that Functional Data Analysis isn’t really an accurate title, but it’s catchy.  He (jokingly?) made the point that if you want people to use your method you need to come up with a good name for it.

Experimenting with ROpenSci and learning to optimize.

I learned about the ritis package when Scott Chamberlain posted about it on twitter a couple weeks ago.  It sounded great, and exactly what I was looking for.  I have a large dataset of plant species that I’ve been fooling around with, but I’ve been hesitant to do anything with it since I’m unsure about the quality of the taxonomy, and, ultimately, tracking down the correct names seemed like a chore I’d rather not attempt.  Not that I’m generally lazy, I’m just lazy about some tasks.

It’s not the Rolling Stone, but it’s a cover nonetheless.

Our Garry oak paper made the cover of Environmental Management, although strangely the journal homepage still has last issues’ cover up, so just trust me on this one.