Monday was a good day at ESA in Austin. There were a few topics I promised to report on in my blogging/tweeting.
…focused on open source data. Carly Strasser’s presentation on guidelines for data management was awesome (including other talks in the symposium on Creating Effective Data Management Plans for Ecological Research). Although this was a good session, I can’t help but wish that they had hammered home the need for open science more. Oh well. Also, they talked a lot about how, and not a lot of why we should properly curate data. Still, a good session. One issue Carly and I talked about was tracking code in versioning systems such as Github. There doesn’t seem to be a culture of versioning code for analyses/simulations in ecology. But when we get there…it will be easier to share/track/collaborate on code.
…used R software. David Jennings talked about a meta-analysis asking if phylogenetic distance influences competition strength in pairwise experiments. David used the metafor package in R to do his meta-analysis. Good form sir.
…did cool science. Matt Helmus presented a great talk on phylogenetic species area curves (likely using R, or Matlab maybe?).
p.s. We launched rOpenSci today.
Oddities:
- The Tilman effect - Tilman’s talk was so packed it looked like there was a line waiting to get into a trendy bar. Here’s a picture (credit: Jaime Ashander). Bigger room next time anyone?
- Wiley came out with an open source journal called Ecology and Evolution. This brings them to 3 open source journals (the other two are in other fields). We (rOpenSci) will attempt to hand-shake with these journals.
- The vegetarian lunch option was surprisingly good. Nice.
