Posts

How many Switzerlands is a California?

My current field work is split between the western United States and Switzerland, areas where political boundaries are drawn on vastly different scales. This makes communicating scale very difficult to audiences in both places. Here I show how to overlay countries and other administrative boundaries from all over the world using R, revealing their relative sizes in a visual, visceral way.

Climate effects on structured populations

The role of individual heterogeneity in population and community dynamics is a centerpiece of my research program. Here I collaborated with Chris Johnson (ETH Zürich) to build an interactive toy model for teaching this concept in an undergraduate course on quantitative methods in ecology at ETH Zürich.

Illuminating the world's demographic dark corners

Demographic models are a widely used and indispensable tool for population ecology. But even after decades of proliferation, they have yet to reach many parts of the world. Here I explore the geographic biases in the COMPADRE and COMADRE databases and reflect on how this affects our understanding of population processes.

Hello World!

A huge number of R tutorials and open data analyses are now available on the web. From time to time I’ll add to the bouquet here.