Tag Archives: entomology

Passive crowdsourcing- finding the data that people don’t know they’re creating

Posted on June 1, 2016 by cbahlai

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

Why the heck aren’t research papers free?

Posted on March 15, 2016 by cbahlai

Should all research papers be free? Um. Yeah. Obviously. Scientific knowledge doesn’t do much good if it’s all locked up, only accessible to the rich and/or privileged. When I put it that way, I never get much argument.1 In fact, the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged best practices, entomology, getting on a soapbox, meta, motivations, open science | 4 Comments

Spreading the open science love like it’s my job because it is my job.

Posted on October 21, 2015 by cbahlai

So, this happened. Apparently, yelling into the void about data management and reproducibility is a very good way to get yourself onto a rag-tag team of open-science proto-superheroes.1 Yes, that’s right, I’m a Mozilla Science fellow, and together, baby, we’re … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged best practices, data, Data Carpentry, data cleaning, data formatting, data hygiene, data manipulation, entomology, impending disaster, meta, motivations, open science, orphaned data | 1 Comment

Dispatches from the field: scattered thoughts edition

Posted on August 5, 2015 by cbahlai

-When the bugs you’re hoping to count don’t show up for your field experiment, that sucks. But it’s also data that says maybe you’re not asking a question that’s relevant to the system. And maybe there’s other questions you need … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bug counting, butterflies, data, entomology, getting on a soapbox, impending disaster, ladybugs, meta, motivations, orphaned data | 1 Comment

#Otherpeoplesdata don’t always look like data- a tale of soybean aphid and scouting records

Posted on June 24, 2015 by cbahlai

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

Open science and the unsung heroes of biocontrol

Posted on December 4, 2014 by cbahlai

Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the staphylinids and carabids. Today, my student, Shahlo Safarzoda’s first paper came out. This is an exciting paper for a lot of reasons. Number one, of course, is that it’s always … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged aphids, best practices, bug counting, entomology, forking the repo, meta, motivations, open science, papers, real data, teaching | 1 Comment

Data management for Bug Counters

Posted on December 15, 2013 by cbahlai

I am a population and community ecologist interested in long term, broad scale patterns in organisms that provide ecosystem services and disservices. Less jargon: I am a data fanatic who likes making equations to describe the things populations of insects … Continue reading →