Note: thanks to Scott for inviting me to contribute to the Recology blog despite being an ecology outsider; my work is primarily in atomic physics. -Pascal A part of me has always liked thinking about how to effectively present information, but until the past year, I had not read much to support my (idle) interest in information visualization. That changed in the spring when I read Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a book that stimulated me to think more deeply about presenting information. I originally started with a specific task in mind–a wonderful tool for focusing one’s interests–but quickly found that Tufte’s book was less a practical guide and more a list of general design principles. Then, a few months ago, I stumbled upon Nathan Yau’s blog, FlowingData, and found out he was writing a practical guide to design and visualization. Conveniently enough for me, Yau’s book, Visualize This, would be released within a month of my discovery of his blog; what follows are my impressions of Visualize This. ...

FigShare - I very much like this idea of a place to put your data online that is NOT published. Dryad is a nice place for datastes linked with published papers, but there isn’t really a place for datasets that perhaps did not make the cut for a published paper, and if known to the scientific community, could potentially help resolve the “file-drawer” effect in meta-analyses. (wow, run on sentence) ...

Stalking the Fourth Domain with Jonathan Eisen, Ph D from mendelspod on Vimeo.

The team at rOpenSci and I have been working on a wrapper for the USA National Phenology Network API. The following is a demo of some of the current possibilities. We will have more functions down the road. Get the publicly available code, and contribute, at Github here. If you try this out look at the Description file for the required R packages to run rnpn. Let us know at Github (here) or at our website http://ropensci.org/, or in the comments below, or on twitter (@rOpenSci), what use cases you would like to see with the rnpn package. ...

There is an awesome position opening up for an assistant professor in systematics at the University of Vermont. Below is the announcement, and see the original post at the Distributed Ecology blog. Why is this related to R? One can do a lot of systematics work in R, including retrieving scientific collections data through an upcoming package handshaking with VertNet (part of the rOpenSci project), managing large data sets, retrieval of GenBank data through the ape package (see fxn read.genbank), phylogenetic reconstruction and analysis, and more. So I am sure a systematist with R ninja skills will surely have a head up on the rest of the field. ...

Interesting talks/posters: Richard Lankau presented research on trade-offs and competitive ability. He suggests that during range expansion selection for increased intraspecific competitive ability in older populations leads to loss of traits for interspecific competitive traits due to trade-offs between these traits. Ellner emphatically states that rapid evolution DOES matter for ecological responses, and longer-term evolutionary patterns as well. [His paper on the talk he was giving came out prior to his talk, which he pointed out, good form sir] ...

Interesting talks/posters: Ethan White’s poster describing EcologicalData.org was of course awesome given my interest in getting data into the hands of ecologists over at rOpenSci.org. Ethan also has software you can download on your machine to get the datasets you want easily - EcoData Retriever. [rOpenSci will try to take advantage of their work and allow you to call the retriever from R] Carl Boettiger’s talk was awesome. He explained how we need better tools to be able to predict collapses using early warning signals. He developed a way to estimate the statistical distribution of probabilities of system collapse. Jennifer Dunne: Explained how she put together an ancient network from Germany. Bravo. Carlos Melian explained his model of network buildup that starts from individuals, allows speciation, and other evolutionary processes. Rachel Winfree told us that in two sets of mutualistic plant-pollinator networks in New Jersey and California, that the least connected pollinator species were the most likely to be lost from the network with increasing agricultural intensity. Dan Cariveau suggests that pollination crop services can be stabilized even with increasing agriculture intensity if in fact pollinator species respond in different ways. That is, some pollinators may decrease in abundance with increasing ag intensity, while other species may increase - retaining overall pollination services to crops.

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. ...

Our development team would like to announce the launch of rOpenSci. As the title states, this project aims to create R packages to make open science more available to researchers. http://ropensci.org/ What this means is that we seek to connect researchers using R with as much open data as possible, mainly through APIs. There are a number of R packages that already do this (e.g., infochimps, twitteR), but we are making more packages, e.g., for Mendeley, PLoS Journals, and taxonomic sources (ITIS, EOL, TNRS, Phylomatic, UBio). ...

I will be blogging about the upcoming Ecological Society of America meeting in Austin, TX. I will focus on discussing talks/posters that: Have taken a cool approach to using data, or Have focused on open science/data, or Done something cool with R software, or Are just exciting in general I will also tweet throughout the meeting from @recology_ (yes the underscore is part of the name, recology was already taken). ...