I changed my camera setting to video. I’ve been waiting for the feeder cam to catch a shot of more than one chipmunk, and finally today I got what looks like a pair courting!

As prior mentioned, I “deconstructed” the histograms on Mike’s site to list species by their peak occurrence dates. This is mostly to help me, as I’m learning butterflies, to know what’s occurring here when. For this week… spicebush swallowtail pink-edged sulphur Indian skipper

Today, a couple found and photo’ed the Columbia co. record at French Creek Wildlife Area!

Here are some of the pitfalls you might run into if you use the Geospatial Modelling Environment (GME): 1st warning: GME summarizes variables by appending them to your shapefile’s attribute table. If you don’t want all those added columns in your “one good input file,” first make a copy of your input file then use […]

This is the week to look for Arctic skipper in WI! The farthest south these butterflies get is Columbia Co., so we’ll see if our naturalist adventures take us there soon.

I use the “traditional” command line tool, grep, for much of my regexp work in R. formulas <- readLines(“full_models.txt”) fragstats <- grep(“IJI|SIDI|IJI_water|LPI|SIDI”, formulas, perl=TRUE, value=TRUE)

Now that the camera is back on the ground, I’m getting mostly chipmunk photos, which is unsurprising given that it’s on a seed pile behind a hedge in Madison, WI. I’m trying to figure out how to get the most useful info from the photos I have. Not that identification is much a challenge with this species, […]

Forgive my detour back to the “dark side”: this is yet again something I needed to get done quickly, so I did it the way I already know. For this example in Python, you’ll need… import arcpy from arcpy import env from arcpy.sa import * import os A few reminders when scripting… make sure your […]

For each species, there’s essentially a weighted range map produced with the BBS data. You can download the shape file for any species, which is a grid with abundance indices in each cell. This is useful if you need to work with distributions of species for spatial analyses. For my purposes, I determined which Bird […]

I’m still not happy with how much I rely on closed-source software like ArcGIS. Yet, I don’t do enough GIS to feel like I can invest the time to learn something new. Also, open-source alternatives are hard to get started with IMO. That sense comes from dabbling, and admittedly not a concerted effort. But, it’s […]