Holiday travel

Last week I traveled back to Minnesota to see family over Thanksgiving. For all of the flying I do, I drive down to Denver and park at a long-term lot near the airport and catch a shuttle. The drive down is just over 2 hours; if the roads are good - that is, no snow or rain - a shortcut goes through Fort Collins. In some ways, Colorado seems close. It is an easy day trip to the Fort Collins area for skiing and I have friends who have taken dance classes down there, and I made day trips to the Defenders of Wildlife Carnivore Conference in Denver last week. However, Laramie is definitely a Wyoming town.

After a bit of a break, I have been back at the biochemistry. After taking classes through undergraduate and MSc work, it can be frustrating to still be taking courses at this point. However, my field work schedule has required me to spread out lecture courses, and this material is so fundamental to my interests that it remains worthwhile to put in lots of time. I have been reviewing past coursework, and considering the needs for my disseration research and what, in general, I would like to have as my background in terms of courses. I hope to finish up courses this spring or next year.

For fall field work this year, we used a US Coast Guard icebreaker to travel to the edge of the sea ice, north of Alaska and Russia, and recapture previously-sampled polar bears. I worked with a science museum (San Francisco Exploratorium) to post dispatches about life in the field, at their website devoted to polar science: http://icestories.exploratorium.edu/dispatches/arctic-projects/the-bears-of-summer/. We disembarked from the ship in early November, leaving about 5 pallets of equipment in the cargo hold. The ship will arrive at its home port in Seattle next week, and the technician working on our project will be there to help sort and ship gear back to Laramie.

READING

After scoping out the other blogs of PiE students, I am going to plagiarize two ideas. Erin included a couple notes about items for reading, and Julie mentioned the recent editorial by David Orr in the December Conservation Biology. If you have online access to the journal, I thought it was a provoking essay.

Reynolds Hike

We started Thanksgiving this year with a hike near Reynolds Hill, Vedauwoo, part of Medicine Bow National Forest. Vedauwoo is pretty windy, so most of the snow from the last storm has been blown away or into piles: some parts of the trail were bare ground while others were buried in well over a foot of snow.

We didn't see anyone else on the trail (my idea of a perfect hike!), just a lot of small mammal tracks in the snow and a few mule deer. I love that we have areas like this less than a 20 minute drive from Laramie:

Photos from hike near Reynolds Hill (Vedauwoo, WY)

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READING: Imbibe Magazine (Nov/Dec 2009)
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Looking forward....

A quick update: I'm spending the day working on OPENbugs code for a stream carbon cycling model and editing figures for my manuscript that was accepted for publication in Oecologia. (I know, *so* exciting!)

The model I'm working on is for this amazingly-time-consuming-but-totally-worth-it Ecological Systems Modeling course offered by Kiona Ogle through Botany/Ecology. The class has dominated a lot of my time this semester, but it's one of the best I've taken while at Wyoming. I am now more confident when it comes to creating and analyzing models - before this semester I felt like an uninformed scientist who knew models were important but didn't know much about the process. And the hard work will pay off - I hope to submit an updated version of the manuscript due as the class "final exam" to Ecological Modelling some time next semester.

Hmmm...lots of publication talk here (can you tell what's on my mind as I start thinking about the next step after grad school?), but I'm also really looking forward to Thanksgiving in Laramie tomorrow: the plan so far is a morning hike in Vedauwoo followed by lots of wine and food with friends from Zoology & Ecology!

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READING: Peers et al. (2009) An ancient light-harvesting protein is critical for the regulation of algal photosynthesis. Nature.
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About this blog

I am a second-year student in the Program in Ecology (PiE) at the University of Wyoming, and my hope is that this blog can provide a bit of insight into the student experience in our program and into Laramie and the surrounding area. I completed a MSc in Zoology and Physiology at the University of Wyoming in the spring of 2008. The previous fall I had begun my search for PhD programs with an interest in the University of Chicago. However, shortly thereafter a faculty from PiE advertised a PhD position for a project that lined up perfectly with my interests. I went through the application and interview process with a pool of national and international applicants, and I was very happy to be able to accept the offered position at the end.

Field work for my project began almost immediately, taking me to the north slope of Alaska several times over the next year and a half. I recently returned from 1.5 months in the field (this picture is from mid-October, on the sea ice north of Alaska), and for the first couple weeks back my life has largely focused on catching up on coursework. I am taking biochemistry this semester, and my professor has been great about allowing me to catch up at my own pace and take missed exams. While organic chemistry was one of the hardest courses I took as an undergraduate, I have had a much better time following, and even enjoying, biochemistry because so much of what we cover can be considered in an applied physiology context. I hope to put up more posts as the semester wraps up.

Submitted!

I don't have time to reflect on yesterday's post, but I do want to share my excitement/relief/anticipation after hearing that a collaborator just submitted a manuscript from some research in 2007. This wasn't part of my M.S. or Ph.D. research, just a side project with some folks from SUNY who were interested in the influences of hydrology on nitrogen cycling in a stream near Lander, WY (photo below). I was the "token ecologist" and measured stream metabolism for the study.

Red Canyon Creek, Wyoming

It was a great collaboration (minus the rattlesnakes in the field), and it's a wonderful feeling to know that the data has finally made it to the "submitted" part of the publication process.

Now we just have to wait the few months to hear back from reviewers....

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READING: Brett et al. (2009) Phytoplankton, not allochthonous carbon, sustains herbivorous zooplankton production. PNAS.
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Fish photo

Several brown trout on spawning redds in Spring Creek. Thanks to the student chapter of the American Fisheries Society for providing the photo.

What to expect?

To be honest: I am still trying to figure out what to ramble about on here....

So I will to start with my favorite version of "what to expect when you're expecting" for new graduate students: "Some modest advice for graduate students" by Dr. Stephen C. Stearns.

Some of the talking points are a bit on the pessimistic side. (I am often accused of being a pessimist with a dark sense of humor - maybe that's why I like this article so much?). But I do think these points reflect the reality of the transition to grad school while avoiding the standard, boring list of suggestions/caveats.

1. Always Prepare for the Worst.
2. Nobody cares about you.
3. You Must Know Why Your Work is Important.
4. Psychological Problems are the Biggest Barrier.
5. Avoid Taking Lectures - They're Usually Inefficient.
6. Write a Proposal and Get It Criticized.
7. Manage Your Advisors.
8. Types of Theses.
9. Start Publishing Early.
10. Don't Look Down on a Master's Thesis.
11. Publish Regularly, But Not Too Much.

My 5 years at Wyoming (2 for MS and 3 so far for PhD) do not make me an expert on graduate school, but I have certainly experienced (un)avoidable failure and exciting success during the past several years, most of which is reflected in Dr. Stearns' list.

More on this soon (whenever I can't come up with anything else to post!).

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READING: Segarra et al. (2009) Coupling soil water and shoot dynamics in three grass species: A spatial stochastic model on water competition in Neotropical savanna. Ecological Modelling.
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Another excuse to get outside

Spawning trout are among the surprising things I've found in Laramie since moving here three months ago. I spent part of my afternoon wrapping up the spawning survey the student chapter of the American Fisheries Society has been conducting on Spring Creek.

It's an unassuming creek, located behind houses and across the street from an elementary school, but it has good spawning habitat used by 16" trout. Not bad for the little stream on my way to campus. My labmate should have some photos, which I'll try to post here soon.