About the bug counter
Hi! I'm Christie and I'm a computational ecologist and professor. I am an #otherpeoplesdata wrangler, stats enthusiast, and, of course, a bug counter. I cohabitate with five other vertebrates: one spouse, one spirited grade schooler, one energetic preschooler and two cats. You can find out more about the kind of work I do at my research website.
Blogs I Follow
Tag Archives: bug counting
Passive crowdsourcing- finding the data that people don’t know they’re creating
I have a new paper out! You can read it: Predicting plant attractiveness to pollinators with passive crowdsourcing.1 A while back, my colleague, Doug Landis, was searching the web for pictures of flowers for a project about native plants, and noticed … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged bees, bug counting, data, entomology, forking the repo, no seriously bees are everywhere, open science, R
6 Comments
#Otherpeoplesdata don’t always look like data- a tale of soybean aphid and scouting records
One of the challenges we face in my field is that there is precious little data documenting small numbers of bugs. In agricultural entomology, especially when you’re dealing with pest insects, we worry much more about too many insects than … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged aphids, bug counting, data, entomology, how-to, ladybugs, motivations, open science, otherpeoplesdata
1 Comment
Dealing with dates as data in Excel
This post is not about dating, as in romantic entanglements, although lots of scientists I know collect data on the dates they go on.* But like dates of the human variety, dealing with dates, as in those pesky things that … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged best practices, bug counting, data, data formatting, data hygiene, data manipulation, excel, otherpeoplesdata, quality control, spreadsheets
5 Comments
So, what am I going to do with this specimen list? (hint: Reshape2)
All right, I’m finally back from all my travelling. I’ve seen many a strange thing in my travels. But now, back to reality.* It’s time for some data manipulation. Where we left off, we had a nice, clean specimen list, … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged bees, best practices, bug counting, coding tips, data, data manipulation, no seriously bees are everywhere, R, reshape, tables
2 Comments
Bridging the data style gap- Part 1- different disciplines, different data formats
This post is first in a series where I will essentially be live-blogging on working on an #otherpeoplesdata dataset. These data are associated with a project examining bee diversity in bioenergy cropping systems. I’ve already done a little bit of … Continue reading
Sharing: it can be harder than you think.
I have a three year old daughter, so you don’t have to tell me how hard it is for some people to share. It’s hard, when you perceive something as yours, when you love it and MOMMY! SHE TOOK IT … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged bug counting, data, getting on a soapbox, motivations, open science, real data, sharing, vampires
10 Comments
Practical Data Management for Bug Counters 