This post is my attempt to recognize all the things I was able to do while science-ing as a pregnant postdoc, while acknowledging that I am not super woman, and that the changing realities of my situation did have (a sometimes frustrating) impact on my work. Continue reading
Last year, I shared my thoughts on why I was openly sharing my newly funded NSF Postdoctoral grant proposal, and why I thought it might be a good idea for science in general. Continue reading
In an earlier post, I outlined my plans to try to teach and use GitHub for code related to our big Biodiversity Working Group. Feb 22-26, 20 members of the group met in Leipzig, Germany, and 6 more (including myself) participated remotely (#sChange on twitter). I felt this was a bit of an experiment, as our group is quite large, and I knew that the majority of participants would be novice git users. There is much yet to do now that the workshop is over, but after a week, I can definitely identify a few challenges and successes in using GitHub for our working group. Continue reading
This week I’m at the annual Ecological Society of America meeting (ESA) to take in the buffet of ecology! There’s a great Organized Session happening tomorrow (8-11:30 am, Tuesday August 11) on “New Perspectives for Ecology during the Anthropocene: New Paradigms, Technologies and Collaborations“. We’ll be tweeting at #AnthropEcology and #ESA100 if you’d like to follow along remotely.
My talk on citizen and open science approaches, using our hummingbird 
migration study as an example, is online at figshare and I encourage tweeting/sharing if you attend the presentation (apparently ESA’s official policy this year is to assume that tweeting is NOT OK, unless explicitly invited to tweet).
If you’re at ESA this year, come say hi to me @srsupp!
For the past year, I’ve been helping to lead of a series of Biodiversity Change Working Groups (funded via sDiv and CIEE, with Maria Dornelas, Mary O’Connor and Andrew Gonzalez). Our goals include resolving controversy in the magnitude and direction of observed diversity changes, theoretically evalutaing methods for estimating and comparing biodiversity across scales, assessing current gaps in data, and analyzing current time series datasets of biodiversity. We are assembling a database of biodiversity time series. Continue reading
I really, really enjoy field work. Although I can often be found at my standing desk wearing my data analysis nerd glasses, my big floppy field hat remains dear to me, and never too far out of reach. Continue reading
This is a public research summary of: Supp, Sarah R., Frank A. La Sorte, Tina A. Cormier, Marisa C. W. Lim, Don R. Powers, Susan M. Wethington, and Catherine H. Graham. 2015. Citizen-science data provides new insight into annual and seasonal variation in migration patterns. Ecosphere 6: art15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/ES14-00290.1 [Open Access]
Our recent paper in Ecosphere uses citizen science data from eBird to look at the movement patterns for five migratory species of North American hummingbirds. Continue reading
Confession: I don’t know how to write a blog. I’ve been told that the only way I can “find my voice” is to just jump in, so please bear with me. There will be awkwardness and growing pains and steep learning curves. I’m doing this because in my recent National Science Foundation grant proposal, I suggested that blogging would be a great broader impact. Then they actually funded my grant – Hooray! So now this blog exists.
In academic writing, authors often provide supplementary materials to accompany the main manuscript. The materials may include additional figures and text describing the analyses, code, or the raw data itself. This supporting information is intended to aid the reader in understanding the paper, to explain complex concepts or methodology, and in some cases, may supply the building blocks for reproducing the research.
It is my intention (and hope) that these posts will act as “Supplementary Materials” to my academic website – extra information about my scientific workflow (like an open lab notebook), about research that I have found interesting or important, about computational tools, and about my general thoughts on academic work and living life.
Discussions and shared experiences with other researchers (online and in person) have greatly shaped my approach to research and collaboration, and have helped me to feel supported during challenging times. I can’t promise that I will have any exciting, groundbreaking, or especially eloquent thoughts to share, but I hope that my Supplementary Materials contribute in some small way back to the wonderful scientific community that I have found.
Supplementary Materials 