Ecology Bits is launched! It\u2019s been a long time in coming. I\u2019ve been wanting to blog for the professional ecological community for years, but there have been stumbling blocks. To be fair, the major one was myself: not for lack of commitment so much as being very picky when it comes to design. I dreamed up a design and then asked a friend and professional artist if she could bring it to fruition. The cost of professional design turned out to be above what I could justify on a grad student stipend and with a child to support. So the idea languished.<\/p>\n
And then I ran out of time to write blog posts anyway. Despite some people always being able to find a time to blog<\/a>, I think that\u2019s only really true if (1) your life is stable; or (2) you don\u2019t have dependents with intensive needs. I was finishing my dissertation while scrapping for the last bit of money to support myself (and the requisite childcare expenses I needed to finish). Simultaneously, I was also trying to find a postdoc position. That happened, and then I needed to uproot my family of three across the country (yet again), and start a new job. Oh yeah, and I was pregnant. New job. Move. New home. New childcare. New doctors. New neighbors. Reregistering. Finding the new stores. It all takes a lot of time. Then there was a new baby.<\/p>\n I find that each move costs me about 2 months of productivity. Each baby costs me between 1-2 year\u2019s worth. When I\u2019m running deficit on work time and family time is saturated, I can\u2019t justify writing blog posts. I must sleep in the only time I have left.<\/p>\n But now it\u2019s a year and a half post-birth, and life is starting to take on a semblance of normal \u2013 whatever that means. One thing is clear: my work time is less infringed upon by breastfeeding and pumping needs. And that means some interstitial times in which to blog again.<\/p>\n I say \u2018again\u2019 because I am not new to blogging. My introduction to blogging began with a conversation in college back in the 1990\u2019s. I was on a long evening walk, as one is in college, with a guy I had recently met. Or rather talked to. I had known of his existence for some time as his social circles of computer science and theater overlapped mine. And he told me that he kept a journal. Online. So anyone could read it. This seemed weird to me, and intriguing. I had kept a journal for many years. In a book on paper. Where only I could read it. Why would someone keep an open journal? Of course, I checked it out<\/a> as soon as I got back to my room. And I loved it. Well, I loved reading<\/em> it. But I had no intention to write my own.<\/p>\n After I graduated from college, a friend of mine and I took a trip around Europe for a summer. But not the standard train-and-hostel trip; we biked. We biked and biked and eventually logged 1,000 miles. We had lots of adventures and I recorded them in my journal. When I got back to the U.S. and started a dreary 9-5 job, I typed them all up, added pictures and \u2018published\u2019 the journey on CD for family.<\/p>\n A few years later I was living and working in Germany. And I had not only the national Germany holidays off and the local Bavarian ones, but I also had the U.S. holidays off. And I had a lot of vacation. In other words, I had a lot of free time and I spent it all traveling. This time, my adventures<\/a> went directly to computer. It was now 2003 and the Internet had taken off, and by posting my pictures<\/a> and writings publicly, I could keep in better contact with my family. It was my first official blog, even though that term hadn\u2019t become mainstream yet. And it was manually formatted in HTML.<\/p>\n After my stint in Germany, I worked on a farm in Wisconsin for a year. Again, I blogged the experience<\/a>, to the enjoyment of my family and friends. They told me that they really enjoyed reading my writing, so I kept on doing it.<\/p>\n I continued writing for a while after that, but found that without a theme to tie my writing to, it wasn\u2019t as compelling to read or interesting to write. That blog<\/a> petered out and I stopped blogging all together.<\/p>\n I picked up blogging again when I was pregnant with my first son in 2009. I was in the midst of a Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota and all my family and most of my friends were elsewhere in the country and world. They wanted to know what was going on. I also had a keen desire to capture the fleeting moments of this new adventure. I blogged<\/a> for about two and a half years \u2013 with a major focus on pictures and video \u2013 until a cross-country move interrupted the flow.<\/p>\n Around the time the baby blog was petering out, a colleague and I were developing an ecology citizen science project in collaboration with the online platform Zooniverse. Called Snapshot Serengeti<\/a>, it launched in December 2012, asking volunteers to identify species in camera trap photos from the Serengeti in Tanzania. Along with the site itself, we started a blog<\/a> to answer volunteer questions and provide a glimpse to the volunteers of what the \u201cprofessionals\u201d (we were both grad students at the time) did behind the scenes. This was fun because it was the first time I had an audience other than my family and friends. I wrote about Serengeti ecology and about the data analysis I was doing with the data the volunteers produced. I got comments. I answered questions. I learned that the people who bothered to comment on the blog were really interested in the project and smart. It\u2019s been a great experience.<\/p>\n My blogging these past couple years has been more sporadic. I write for the Snapshot Serengeti blog on occasion. I write for a blog<\/a> I started in conjunction with a new citizen science project called Season Spotter. And I guest blog for Dynamic Ecology from time to time.<\/p>\n I really enjoy Dynamic Ecology<\/a> for both its range of content as well as its comment discussions. It\u2019s arguably the most widely read ecology blog focusing on the culture and practice of professional ecology. I also regularly read Small Pond Science<\/a>, Tenure She Wrote<\/a>, Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/a>, and The Contemplative Mammoth<\/a>. And, like many, Female Science Professor<\/a> was my gateway blog into reading academic blogs.<\/p>\n I\u2019m happy to start up my own academic blog now. It means that I\u2019ll have an outlet for the bazillion things I write or want to write. And maybe I\u2019ll even have a few readers. And generally, posts will be shorter than this one. I have a lot of opinions about design, as I mentioned. One thing I believe is that most blog posts ought to be kept to about 500 words. But since no one reads the very first post of a blog, I\u2019m safe with this one. (You\u2019re not reading this, are you?) And while I\u2019m not head-over-heels in love with the current blog design, it\u2019s good enough for now.<\/p>\n You might think that, given the timing, starting this blog is a New Year\u2019s resolution. It\u2019s not really. I don\u2019t save my resolutions for a specific time of year. But I do happen to have a little bit of extra time right now to get over the activation energy hump of starting a blog. My goal for 2016 is #50posts\u2013 about one blog post per week for a year. My secret goal is to get picked up by Dynamic Ecology\u2019s Friday links at least once a month.<\/p>\n Content will be ecology-centric, with some focus on the computer, algorithms, and statistical side of (ecological) data analysis. I was a computer scientist before I became an ecologist. Also diversity stuff, because when you\u2019re a tech-phile and math-phile and female and a parent, it\u2019s hard to avoid. And citizen science, because it\u2019s fun and important. And likely many thoughts on the academic system and on being a postdoc within it. And advice for other postdocs and for grad students. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ecology Bits is launched! It\u2019s been a long time in coming. I\u2019ve been wanting to blog for the professional ecological community for years, but there have been stumbling blocks. To be fair, the major one was myself: not for lack of commitment so much as being very picky when it comes to design. I dreamed … <\/p>\n