Social Networks and Ecological Food Webs

I read an interesting recent article that discussed a digital "autopsy" of the social network Friendster. Friendster was the grandfather of the social network, preceding both MySpace and Facebook. At its peak it had over 100 million users and a $30 million buyout offer from Google (which they turned down). However, following some technical problems and a...

A Maxent Script Tool for ArcGIS

As part of my PhD research at the University of Arizona where I study biogeography, biodiversity and macroecology, I have been part of a group looking at large-scale biodiversity questions for New World plants. In this role, I have been responsible for generating many species distribution models using Stephen Phillip's Maxent software (and R with the Dismo...

Speedy Attribute Editing with a Custom ArcMap Add-In

One of my colleagues, TerraSystems Southwest, is assisting The Nature Conservancy in Tucson with the Sonoran Desert Disturbed Lands Analysis project. As part of their scope of work, they were asked to assess the level and type of land disturbance for over 100,000 1-square mile hexagons covering the Sonoran Desert. As you might expect, editing the attributes...

Creating a Video of Vegetative Cover Sampling

As part of my graduate obligations for a course in methods of measuring and monitoring plant populations, I had to do some type of course project. Though our instructor offered several options of varying difficulty, it was clear that he really wanted someone to attempt to produce a video outlining how to do a method....

A Species Diversity Map for 88,000 New World Species

This is a small sample of a species diversity map that's an end product of our models. This was created by overlaying 88,000+ shapefiles and represents the number of species potentially present in each cell. Red is low, dark blue and purple are high (over 8,000 species per cell).

Mobile Apps for Naturalists

Since nearly everyone carries a smartphone these days, we can now carry a small library worth of field guides with us inside our phones so we never miss an opportunity to identify an interesting organism. With this in mind, here are a few mobile applications that are today's field ecologist or naturalist should definitely consider having...