Leaves

The fawn in my yard

 "Mother, make me a big tall tree
So I can shed my leaves and let it blow through me"
- "Mother" by Florence + The Machine

Friends, I don't need to tell you this, but 2020 has been hard. We're nearing the end of it now, so I'm trying to take inspiration from the deciduous trees outside and let things go. Actually, yesterday, a baby deer - a fawn - showed up in my backyard. My husband and I gazed out the large window in our dining room as the fawn nonchalantly nibbled on ivy. It was a beautiful moment of calm. 

Yes, this year has been hard. It feels like every day, there is something new to figure out or fix. Almost as if the pandemic is a long, complex piece of code that I have to debug with no manual and very little else to go on. That's right, friends, as you can probably tell from that metaphor, I have been coding again. I stepped away from the model I was working on during this spring's lockdown to focus on lab work, field work, and mentoring my intern over the summer. Now that it's autumn, I'm back at it - and just as determined as before.

Modelling struggles. That orange blob is a species that 
grew waaaay too fast.

As you may recall, I'm trying to simulate data to compare to my actual data on fouling communities from 2017. My data simulations involve 3 different factors: recruitment (species colonizing the panel), overgrowth (species growing to occupy space and compete with one another), and thermal tolerance (some species dying when it gets too warm). I can model recruitment and thermal tolerance really well, but the overgrowth is giving me headaches. One species will grow out of control, and as soon as I fix it, another one will be totally off. It's like a computer-based game of whack-a-mole.

The good news is that I'm slowly making progress and refining my model to better approximate my observed data. Just a few more steps, and I should be able to call my analysis complete!