Full data and analysis here
Publication here
Powdery Mildew on Whitestem Filaree I was walking around my neighborhood in Davis, CA one day when I noticed a strange looking weed on the ground that had powdery mildew on it’s surface. Powdery mildews are a group of biotrophic fungi that I had studied for my master’s degree. They are often times host specific, and do not regularly kill their host, but rather sap nutrients and water from the epidermal cells.
There has been more and more research on how to better design figures and color schemes to suit a broader audience. Roughly 8% of men and 0.5% of women have some sort of colorblindness, so if I present a figure during an extension or scientific talk, I really need to make sure that the information comes across correctly.
Luckily, there are lots of great packages out there that give options on what color scales I can use.
You can find the code for this post at
Cyclosporiasis is an intestinal sickness caused by the coccidian parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis. An outbreak in 2017 seemingly from Mexican cilantro has affected many people, and the Texas public health board and CDC put out some of the data publically. I wanted to go through this data, make choropleth plots for the counties affected (because I am unfamiliar with Texan counties) and plot out the data.
Full analysis here
Mangos are grown widely in South Florida, but only a few varieties ever make it north, because they don’t really ship well and there isn’t a huge market. I ended up receiving some rare varieties from a collaborator down south, and I wanted to know how they ranked one to another, so my wife and I rated the different varieties.
The Data My wife and I rated the mangoes over the course of about a week, tasting the different varieties as they felt more and more ripe.
Bird Age Full analysis is here
I stumbled across a dataset of bird ages on a USGS website, and wanted to know if there was a relationship between bird age and other variables (weight, wingspan, etc).
Link Between Bird Age and Phylogenetic Order? I wanted to know if there was any signal for how old birds get if theyre closely related. Ultimately, I would love to know how age is affected by size (weight, wingspan, whatever) but I cant find open datasets for that.