Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Food Webs are Pretty

The reason I am here in Italy is to attend a short course on food-webs. The organizers of the course have invited 6 of the top (or near the top) scientists that study food-webs to give substantial lectures both on the history of food-webs and current research. Ftor those of you that care, the list includes the likes of:

Jennifer Dunne
Neo Martinez
Mercedes Pascual
Jane Memmot
Andy Dobson

In exchange for a tuition waver (which is the equivalent of 500 euros), all I had to do was give a short presentation on my research. I gave said presentation yesterday, so it's all downhill from here. So far I have learned quite a bit, including how to use R (a popular data analysis program) and how to make pretty pictures of food webs. Isn't it great?

3 comments:

Liv said...

Oooohhh. You're with the Web Gods! That's very very cool and I'm super jealous. I excited you're learning R, now when I have questions I have someone to bug! And your foodweb is beautiful... is that from their website or did you make it with other data? Its lovely. I showed some like that in AP Enviro last year from their awesome website.

penn said...

ooh, I am jealous too. All those cool people all in one place? I could so squeee :-)

and, yes, very pretty food web. Looks similar to one of Neo Martinez' that I had in my prelim talk. I do so love food webs. Maybe one of these days I'll stop feeling bitter and go read about them again.

Karen said...

That is so cool. I am impressed. I would have loved to hear you speak. Have a wonderful time. I love you.