This week I had the opportunity to present at the 3rd annual Incorporating Data Science and Open Science in Aquatic Research summit as part of their session focused on data intensive models. I was so excited to be invited to present, and the organizers did a fabulous job of making the virtual space accessible and welcoming for all of the participants. If you are interested, a recording of my talk can be accessed on YouTube at the link below:
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I'm excited to announce that not one, but two publications I was a part of while working at the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project were recently published! The first manuscript develops prioritization tools for the management of California watersheds using StreamCat, environmental justice, and bioassessment datasets and presents their application at a number of pilot sites throughout the state. The second manuscript presents a newly developed interactive database - the Toxicity of Microplastics Explorer (ToMEx) - for helping synthesize the recent explosion in microplastics toxicity data. Both the aquatic organism and human health effect versions of the dashboard are live and publicly available!

It's hard to believe a year has already passed here at UNR! Here are a few photos from my local exploring with the Blaszczak lab, friends, and family.

Check out our new paper in Oikos! We examined changes in giant kelp tissue nutritional content over the past 19 years using an existing Santa Barbara Coastal Long Term Ecological Research site dataset. Our results suggest that the nutritional content of giant kelp has declined, and that this decline is correlated with increasing seawater temperatures. A  big thank you to my fantastic co-authors, Kyle, Jenny, and Bob! Click on the buttons below to see and hear news coverage about this work:

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!