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: real data
How does sampling design impact what we conclude about deer tick populations?
“Our main takeaway is that long term studies are very useful for understanding long term populations dynamics and are more likely to reach a stable pattern. We should be cautious with using short term studies (especially those less than 5 years) to interpret longer term population trends of deer ticks because they may lead to misleading results. In addition, dragging has proved to be a more reliable method for reaching consistent results, providing support for using standardized methods.” Continue reading
Of time series and ticks
With so much attention on ticks and Lyme disease – there must be lots of long term datasets, right?! A guest post by RIT student Sofie Christie Continue reading
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
Cleaning up your act: simple ways to find errors in your raw data
It’s been an interesting week. We had a massive ice storm in the eastern Great Lakes area, trees and power lines were totaled, power was out everywhere- I didn’t have electricity for four days. Things, basically, are a disordered mess, … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged best practices, data, data cleaning, data hygiene, excel, large datasets, plots, quality control, R, real data, spreadsheets, tables
9 Comments
Formatting your data tables for storage and re-use
If you follow me on twitter, you probably know I’m compiling a huge dataset. I’ve used a variety of tools to work on these data (most notably reshape and OpenRefine), and now the data is in its cleanest form- a … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged aphids, best practices, data, data formatting, excel, real data, spreadsheets, stats, style, tables
5 Comments
Practical Data Management for Bug Counters 