Presentations, outreach, side projects, and whatever feels relevant
🎙️ Santa Cruz Naturalist Podcast Part 1
I was invited by Frankie Gerraty to talk about dunes, my research, collaborating with the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, and colonialism on a local Santa Cruz podcast. It was a lot of fun. Here is Part 2 as well!
🗣️ Dune Restoration and the Reawakening of Cultural Practices with the Amah Mutsun Land Trust
Here is my presentation at SERCAL talking about my collaboration with the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, dunes, my research, and what I think scientists should emphasize in working towards restoration. You cannot see my face, but I hope it is still enjoyable!
💻 Aspect-Dissimilarity Exploration
Here is an exploration of trying to use aspect as a categorical variable when calculating dissimilarity between plots. You’d think someone else would have solved this, but I had to do it myself. I pray one other person, one day, might find this useful because it basically sucked me into a blackhole.
🗣 Dunes, Death, and Identity: Weathering Grad School When You Barely Know Who You Are
This is a presentation that I am particularly proud of. It was a flash talk as a part of the Cómo Haces Ecología? Como Você Faz Ecologia? How Do You Do Ecology? Latine Voices in Our Community of Ecologists INSPIRE Session at the Ecology Society of America Conference. Here I weave my family history with the ups and (specifically) the downs of my grad school experience; all in 5 minutes! I had never spoken so personally in public before and it felt like a big step of growth for me.
💻 Meta Analysis Tool
Here is a tool I created that created to help with systematic reviews. It scrapes all the pdfs from a search string in Web of Sciences, downloads the pdfs from multipls sources, uploads all the information to a google sheet, and then makes a fun word cloud! This is what I used for my systematic review of dune plant community assembly with the Dune Crew™️! You can also watch a live demo here!
📊 Stats Support Group
Since 2023, I have led my graduate program’s statistical support group. A space where peers can try new techniques and receive judgement-free feedback specific to their work is both rare and extraordinarily valuable. The goal of the group is to help students navigate the daunting task of analyzing the ecological data they’ve collected throughout their time within the program. A typical session focuses on one student at a time; that way we can help brainstorm and support the statistical side of their projects at any point in the process. This can be achieved in a wide array of methods: from planning their experimental designs to fine tuning their models to just the mention of a new statistical technique in a casual conversation. When I began leading the group, I wanted to diversify the sessions by discussing issues of justice in the ecological/statistical space and one way I have achieved this is through the creation of awards. A lot of the work we do goes unrecognized, so each term I acquire funding to award one presenter and one supporter $150.