Sunday 23 September 2012

PhD week 29: Fieldwork aftermath

Trotter's Gorge, northeast of Palmerston. The real thing.

We returned home from the field trip earlier than expected due to my leaving a cheap and easily replaceable, but vital item on the side of the road. It was annoying at the time, but exactly the sort of thing that I had wanted to figure out on this trip. Aside from this ignoble end, the remainder of the trip was great. We found Irenimus in most locations, sometimes in quite high numbers. We also discovered some incredible places: Trotter's Gorge in particular was amazing. It's acessability and utter lack of publicity makes its beauty especially remarkable.

Upon our return, I had insect and soil samples to label and put into appropriate storage. As I have collecting events with a measure of collecting effort (namely, time), I also started a collecting events spreadsheet that contains a lot of additional information that can't be presented on an insect label. This information will be stored electronically, linked by a collection number to the specimen which will allow the data to be associated with the specimen in the future. Among the information which is included is a geomorphological description of the collection site. It has been great to learn the basics of this rich field, and it will be fun to learn more about describing landscapes, as well as applying it.


Read:
   Edwards AWF. 1972. Likelihood. An account of the statistical concept of likelihood and its application to scientific inference. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
   Borg MJ. 2001. Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. HarperOne, New York.
   McCulloch D. 2010. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years London: Penguin
   Psalms 115–118

Websites:
andywibbels.com—How to add Google Analytics to your Blogger blog
Ubuntu Forums—Preserving filenames in ImageMagick
Beginner's guide to Police harassment
Clipartist.net—Aggregating, annotating and enhancing public domain and creative commons clipart

Listened:
A Game of Thrones audiobook read by Roy Dotrice

Watched:
Sifting—Animation showing the collecting process of the LLAMA expedition
Firefly

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