weather

It's been a strange weather year in much of the U.S. I'm currently working on Hine's emerald dragonfly monitoring near Chicago, and have seen several examples already this summer of natural stochasm in action.

Through June, rainfall was well above normal. One site, on a river, flooded at least twice. Others, away from major watercourses, were wet but less extremely so. One storm in late June included high winds, severe enough to break tree branches, and probably to damage the fragile wings of dragonflies caught away from shelter.

Then the the rain just stopped for a couple of weeks, and water levels fell to what would be expected for mid-summer.

This morning another storm moved through. There were more fallen branches, more power outages, more heavy rain. Weather is expected to improve for the rest of the week, so we'll be right back out there to see what effect it's had.

Early in my dragonfly studies, I watched female Hine's emerald dragonflies oviposit in a range of locations from cool spring runs to warmer lower channels. Under normal conditions, the middle streamlet reaches are usually optimal habitat; the spring runs are too cool and slow development, and the lower resches are too warm and too prone to fish and other predation on larvae, as well as increased competition from other odonates.

Using the full length of the streamlet hedges bets, and ensures survival of some animals through drought, or flood, or "normal" conditions. In a stochastic floodplain environment, it's a logical strategy.

Too often when planning restoration projects we fail to account for stochasm. We target "normal" conditions, even though "normal" will not happen in some years. By designing restoration sites without allowing for stochasm, we could potentially doom some populations.

social networking

I'm probably one of the last 34 people on earth who isn't on Facebook, largely as a result of privacy concerns... although in part that's a matter of principle. I do have a fairly active LinkedIn account, a necessity in my line of work, and with careful management of preferences I'm willing to tolerate the occasional annoyances that come with a site's relentless efforts to grow.

Yesterday I was invited... twice, actually... to join the two-day old limited public beta test of Google + and despite what the press is saying about access being cut off for a while, I was able to set up a page with no difficulty at all. As the various articles and tech blogs are saying, there's a reasonable level of control over privacy settings, setup is simple, and it's generally a much more adult experience as one would expect with a more mature company. The integration with other things that I use a lot... gmail, Google docs, maybe eventually this blog? is also a big plus. So I'm willing to give it a try, even as I recognize that it's a tradeoff to some extent, and with the realization that spending more time online is probably the last thing I want to do.

It's a necessity to network effectively these days,  especially for people like me who work all over the U.S. So far this looks like one more potentially effective tool, and time will tell how true that turns out to be.

administrative moments

We're approaching an office move, into new and larger space across the street. That's very much a good thing, the existing space is showing it's age, and the new building layout will be much more conducive to teamwork and functioning in groups.

The move won't  actually happen for about another three weeks, but I'm going to be out on project sites monitoring dragonflies for much of that time, so I need to be essentially ready to go by the end of today. There's a wall of boxes stacked up near my desk, mostly books, but including some paper files and lots of binders full of old endangered species recovery plans and regulatory guidance.

If I ignore the boxes and look only at my nice clean desk and nearly empty bookshelves, the lack of clutter is enticing. That's making me think about how to pare down, simplify, at the other end... a sentiment which will be encouraged by the fact that I've intentionally specified a little less shelf space in the new office.

A lot of what's in those binders is readily available online these days. Last night I began to set up a file structure and tested it by downloading a few documents. I will probably spend part of this upcoming holiday weekend doing more of that, and setting up resource folders on an external hard drive. Longer term, I'm anticipating one drive on my desk, another as a backup and kept offsite, not unlike the way I already back up my photos, which tend to be dramatically larger files than the documents I'm presently working with. Then a set can also go onto the network, and as my ecology group expands the information will be available across offices.

The idea is to exchange entire bookshelves for a couple of hard drives taking up not much more space than a paperback book each. And then, once the easy stuff is done, I can have admin start scanning paper files on slower days, and eventually get rid of most of that paper as well.

I have no illusions about keeping some sort of clean minimalist office, the nature of consulting is that day to day existence is chaotic and unpredictable, and piles of paper will happen when there's no time to sort and arrange things. But perhaps a simplified form of anarchy is a reasonable expectation?.