Lab Notes

During a trivial conversation with colleagues, we came to imagine what a counting session could sound like if PolyCounter would play a different music tone every time a key is pressed (i.e. a pollen is counted). With a counting history, and with Processing, I was able to produce such a pollen symphony.

I recently found a pollen of Persicaria maculosa-type. I didn’t know about this type before, and as the grain was not well preserved and folded, at first I thought about Armeria. But I wasn’t convinced about that, specially given the details provided by the Flora Helvetica, which didn’t fit with the study site at all, even long time ago. Hopefully, thanks to colleagues, we came to identify it as the old Polygonum persicaria-type. Looking in tela botanica, I found that Polygonum persicaria is now known as Persicaria maculosa, and is common at my study site. And finally, I found the Persicaria maculosa-type in Beug (2004)!

Reference Beug, H.-J. (2004). Leitfaden der Pollenbestimmung für Mitteleuropa und angrenzende Gebiete. München: Pfeil.

I’ve been writing so much last days on several manuscripts at the same time that, paradoxically, I haven’t taken time to write something on my weekly report. So here it is: I’ve been writing a lot in the last days 😛

I am currently preparing some more samples to analyze during the long wintery quiet Saturdays, and I will be back to writing during “weekdays”.

Additionally: I enhanced a lot my age-depth model plots with R!

Since exactly two years, I write a summary once a week to keep track of what’s happening, mostly about work matters, but occasionally about personal events also. I decided to write them here instead, as a public short lab notebook.

But, there is no much to say currently! I tried to achieved many things during the last days to get ready for Christmas Holidays. I’m finally back in France for two weeks, but you can still reach me by email 😉 More will come in the next weeks. In the meantime, I’m getting better with Illustrator.

I spent one month from mid-January to mid-February 2013 at the University of Kalmar (Sweden) to learn the theory of quantitative reconstruction of past vegetation. It consisted in courses and practical work to get used to the models developed by Shinya Sugita (including the models REVEAL and LOVE, as well as the Landscape Reconstruction Algorithm). This was the opportunity to apply these models to my data and represent so far the first attempt in the Alps.