Paintbrush Ponderings
Alan Nelson’s key to Oklahoma Castilleja from Keys and Descriptions For The Vascular Flora of Oklahoma.
What started out as a quick photo for a simple post turned into an afternoon of studying multiple taxonomic keys, distribution maps and pollination ecology.
Since I work in the border counties along the Red River in Oklahoma, my primary reference for plant identification is the Flora of North Central Texas (FNCT).
Landscape Linguistics II
Oak savanna with encroaching brush
A previous post provides some context to the following discussion but isn’t required.
Landscapes provide lots of information regarding their current and historical status. We just have to learn to listen - or see.
A large Post Oak surrounded by much smaller Shumard oaks, cedars and ashes.
The big oak on the right of the above image has no lower limbs, nor does it have recent burn scars.
Landscape Linguistics I
Eastern Redcedar seedling in understory
The Language of the Land
The quality of the story depends on the skill of the listener.
Rumor has it that the Inuit have a hundred or so words in their language for “snow”. I’m sure that most of those would be lost on me because I simply don’t have the sophistication to distinguish them. Having grown up in Southern Oklahoma where there’s no guarantee we’ll even see snow from one year to next - I never developed that much of an appreciation for it outside of the fact that sometimes it makes better snowballs(and hurts worse when you get hit).
Publications
Current Projects
Webb, S.L., J.A. Martin, M.D. Proctor, and S.M. Harju. In preparation. Long-term occupancy of male northern bobwhite quail: effects of temporally and spatially dynamic landscapes.
Wolfe, B., C. Nicholson, M.D. Proctor, and S.L. Webb. In preparation. Methods for developing and analyzing bioacoustic templates from field recordings: applications to avian ecology.
Magazine Articles
Webb, Stephen, Proctor, Mike. 2020. 7 Things Research Tells Us About Northern Bobwhite and What They Need.
Range Ecology Network
Looking at Range Ecology as a Network
The following is a convoluted attempt to capture and visualize many of the relationships involved in rangelands. While certainly not exhaustive, the objective was to at least demonstrate representative relationships taking place on the landscape.
Relationships are depicted by a combination of “nodes” , which are any factors capable of influencing any other factor, and “edges” (the lines between nodes) which indicate the direction(s) of that relationship.
Rudimentary R and Knecessary Knowledge
By Mike Proctor
| Dec 11, 2021
| rstudio
The Bare Necessesities
Learning R from scratch can be an onerous task. When I first started to learn programming, the only development environment was a text editor, and mice were just vermin that you really didn’t want in the computer lab. There just wasn’t that much to learn at once. Things have changed. Not only are you trying to learn the syntax of R but the idiosyncrasies of an IDE(RStudio), and all the assorted details like data structures and types.
Disturbingly Undisturbed
Too much of the same is rarely a good thing.
For the most part we have a very narrow concept of what native rangeland vegetation should look like. That view tends to be very static. We don’t realize that what we see on a single visit is not necessarily what it will look like on the next visit. What we lack awareness of is how the plant communities vary over time depending on what is taking place on the landscape.
Packages and Libraries in R
By Mike Proctor
| Nov 15, 2021
| rstudio
Packages/Libraries
These are scripts written by others that deal with a specific task or types of data.
For example the “lubridate” package deals entirely with formatting and working with dates and times.
The capacity to use scripts contributed by others are one of the things that make R (and Python) so useful.
Whatever you are trying to do, someone has probably developed one or more packages to deal with it.
Pane layout in RStudio
By Mike Proctor
| Nov 15, 2021
| rstudio
Pane layout in RStudio
Upon opening RStudio there are some areas of interest to point out.
The location of these may vary depending on whose machine you are looking at as they can be customized to personal preferences.
The RStudio interface consists of four “panes”.
These panes show different types of information related to your code.
Some also have their own tabs at the top that pertain to different types of information.
Setting up a project in RStudio
By Mike Proctor
| Nov 15, 2021
| rstudio
Setting up a project in RStudio
Projects in RStudio act something like a container for your “project”. Working with projects helps to keep your files and data organized. (You don’t technically have to use a project but life will be easier.) Setting a project up really isn’t as complex as it sounds.
Start RStudio, click on “File/Project” and either create a folder or select a folder for the project.