Over the past few months, I've organized a series of 20+ coding workshops and hacky hours focused on learning data tidying, analysis, and visualization skills in R/RStudio. The group has covered the basics of using R and RMarkdown, cleaning up data using the tidyverse, creating beautiful visualizations using ggplot and sf, collaborating with others using Git and GitHub, and lots more. If you're interested in following along, all session recordings, scripts, and datasets can be found at our repository on GitHub. Also, I'd like to extend a huge thank you to our many guest lecturers as well as a special thank you to the authors of the palmerpenguins package - Allison Horst, Alison Hill, and Kristen Gorman - which makes several appearances throughout the series.

In mid-October, I co-taught an R workshop for novice to intermediate R/RStudio users at the joint California Society for Freshwater Science and California Bioassessment Workgroup virtual conference. Over the course of the two-day workshop, 40 attendees learned skills in data wrangling, tidying, and visualization, and we were assisted by a fantastic team of helpers who coordinated debugging assistance and fielded questions in real time as my co-instructor, Ryan Peek, and I live-coded the lessons. All of the material, including session recordings, can be found on our website - https://ucd-cws.github.io/CABW2020_R_training/ . I would also like to extend a special thank you to Allison Horst, who allowed us to use her fantastic monsteR illustrations throughout.

In May, I successfully defended my dissertation (setup below) to a virtual audience of family, friends, faculty, and former students (and a live audience of two cats and one husband). I am so grateful to everyone for all of their support and encouragement, and special thanks to John Melack who first provided me with this opportunity and has consistently been my advocate and my mentor.

Throughout my degree, I had the support of a tremendous group of friends and family in Santa Barbara and all over the country. I found an incredible community at UCSB, and I am so grateful for all of the friendships and adventures I couldn’t have even begun to envision five years ago. Thank you everyone!

I recently co-hosted a session titled "Marine Sediments: Fluxes, Fauna, and Forecasting" alongside Tina Treude (UCLA) at this year's Ocean Sciences Meeting in San Diego, CA. I also participated in the Ocean Data Labs workshop and presented my ongoing work examining permeable sediments surrounding giant kelp forests as a source of nutrients to the overlying water column. This was my first ever OSM, and I am already looking forward to OSM 2022 in Honolulu! (If anyone is interested in hosting a similar sediment-themed session at the next meeting, please feel free to get in touch!)

It was a busy summer spent finishing up the field and lab portions of my last dissertation chapter! I collected cores from the nearby Goleta Slough and members of the SBC LTER collected cores from nearby kelp forests for use in my sediment bioreactor setup. If you're interested in learning more about my findings, I'll be presenting the results of this project at the upcoming 2020 Ocean Sciences Meeting.

The LTER community Instagram recently featured SBC LTER researchers, field sites, and ongoing projects based out of UC Santa Barbara, myself included. Check it out!

Last week, Katherine Le graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a B.S. in Biological Sciences and a minor in Earth Science. With generous support from the Worster Award, she completed and presented an independent project examining the contribution of zooplankton excretion to giant kelp forest nutrient budgets. She has been an invaluable member of our laboratory group for the past few years, contributing to numerous dissertation and summer REU projects, and she will be greatly missed. However, she's already embarked on her next adventure! Just a few days after graduating, she flew cross-country to start her new position as the Environmental Data Initiative Fellow at the Lacawac Sanctuary and Biological Field Station. Congratulations Katherine!!