I’ve been keeping odd-looking rocks I don’t know what to make of to ID later. This one looks like brecciated jasper(?) that got cemented within quartz. There is some banding around the broken pieces.

Until I figure out how to pin posts in a tag(?) here’s where my posts have gotten us so far with a starter script for BBS data. Start with the data tutorial before getting to this step to download North American BBS data. This script imports your data into R… rm(list = ls()) setwd(“”) library(foreign) […]

My significant other, in getting his M.S. research ready for publication, introduced me to multilevel modeling, and we worked through a reanalysis together. Now, I’m also interested to apply this framework to my 2nd dissertation chapter before publishing, so I can model cohesive community response while still extracting species’ responses. The following code block is copied […]

I cleared up the “ophitic basalt” debate, at least to my satisfaction, this evening. I went to a beach listed in my book to have a good amount of ophitic basalt, and it looks quite different to me than what I would identify as diabase (I found some of that there too).

Most of the rocks at Flood Bay are basalt. I’m still confused about how to differentiate ophitic basalt from diabase, though. One of my books draws a distinction, but another doesn’t. I read into it online, but I’ll have to keep studying in the field!

When I was in early elementary school, I really liked rocks, but my interest in minerals wore out sometime not long thereafter. When I was little, I remember looking through the gravel with friends, the prizes being chalk rocks, quartz and the occasional geode you could break open, which were my favorite finds! We used […]

As highlighted in the feature photo, it’s hard to come to Lake Superior and not notice the rocks. There are seemingly so many different kinds of beautiful colors along the shore. I learned about agates and began looking for them along the beach, but I wanted to know about everything I was encountering, so I […]

I got to the wetland at 7pm, with the last possible shot of OK light. Luckily, my Swarovski scope was able to make the most of it. I ran into a few birders there who were grateful for the gear as well! We picked out the sharp-tailed sandpiper at the back of the flooded field […]

A few tips and tricks along the way for spatial models… you must have an observation for every feature those observations must be in order of the shape file the corresponding identifier can only be (1:length of shape file) I’m not sure the spatial effect alone will be much more than a localized range map […]

The forecast from the coronal hole panned out: the night was spectacular; I only wished I had something better than an iPhone to catch it all on! I was watching a great northern lights show (a bright green homogeneous band over the city and the lake, reflecting off the water) when the moon began to […]