Author: Luke Miller
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Preparing for the upcoming field season
Production is ramping up for the imminent start of two field experiments in Alaska and California. In both cases we’ll be manipulating tide pool temperatures using heaters to slightly raise water temperatures during low tide. To get ready for that, I’ve been working on soldering and assembling the custom circuit boards that will handle the…
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More field sampling in Sitka
The process of sampling all of our experimental tide pools in Sitka is slowly coming to an end for this trip. We carried out several rounds of water sampling for water chemistry during the daytime and nighttime, along with surveying diversity in the pools and prepping the pools for the future summer experiment. Taking water…
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Alaska in January
In collaboration with Cascade Sorte and Matt Bracken from UC Irvine, and Kristy Kroeker from UC Santa Cruz, we are currently up in Sitka Alaska carrying out seasonal sampling for our NSF-funded project “Collaborative Research: Effects of Multiple Aspects of Climate Change on Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning”. Much of the current trip’s work centers…
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Tidepool nutrient cycling manipulations
Summer number 1 of our collaborative research project with the Bracken and Martiny lab groups at UC Irvine is proceeding nicely. Our teams have been manipulating mobile grazers, such as limpets, littorine snails, chitons, and hermit crabs, in experimental tidepools in order to measure the growth responses of the photosynthetic algae in these pools (among…
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We’ve moved
As of August 2018, I relocated my lab, and everything else in my life, to San Diego. I have joined the San Diego State University Biology Department as an Assistant Professor. If you are a student interested in undergraduate, masters, or Ph.D. research opportunities in marine ecophysiology, biomechanics, and climate change impacts on rocky shore…
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Brief mention in Map-making on a budget
Some of the R code I have previously posted here for working with NOAA’s optimal interpolated sea surface temperature (OISST) datasets made its way into a recent piece in a Nature news and commentary piece on open-source map-making tools by Jeffrey Perkel. The article details the expansion of open-source tools for visualizing spatial data that…
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Waterproofing sensors for mussel monitoring
We have recently published two new papers in the Journal of Experimental Biology detailing the results of field experiments we carried out. Our goal was to monitor the behavior and internal temperatures of sea mussels (Mytilus californianus) on the shoreline, and link their recent experiences to their physiological status. There can be substantial variation in…
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Field work at Bodega Marine Lab
Last week was the kickoff a new project looking at diversity and productivity effects of nutrient and temperature alterations in high intertidal pools. This work is being done in collaboration with Matt Bracken’s Marine Biodiversity Lab group at UC Irvine. Pictured below are Dylan Projansky from SJSU, Matt Bracken (center), Genevieve Bernatchez (UCI), and Samuel…
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A solar-powered tide clock using Arduino tide prediction libraries
Robert Werner has developed a solar-powered tide clock using my Arduino tide prediction libraries (GitHub link) I previously described here and here. The Instructables page shows how Robert used a servo motor to actuate a pair of hands on a dial face. The red and blue hands give you the time of the next high…
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Processing Rmarkdown documents with Eclipse and StatET
Processing R markdown (Rmd) documents with Eclipse/StatET external tools requires a different setup than processing ‘regular’ knitr documents (Rnw). I was having problems getting the whole rmarkdown -> pandoc workflow working on Eclipse, but the following fix seems to have resolved it, and I can generate Word or HTML documents from a single .Rmd file…