September 2011 Archives

Imagine you had the task of capturing, condensing, and packaging the science, the place, and the people of RMBL for college students that don’t have the opportunity of visiting RMBL. Where would you start? Now imagine that you are a geologist from Albuquerque who had never worked at RMBL before. Does that sound daunting? Thankfully, I’ve had a lot of help.

I came to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in June 2010 (two weeks after leaving a faculty position at the University of New Mexico) for a unique post-doctoral opportunity to work with Ian Billick to produce a web site highlighting long-term RMBL data sets through college-level curriculum. The site was to include rich context to give users a good sense of the place, the people, and the processes involved in field science.

After one year and a few months, we are very close to releasing Digital RMBL (beta version). I have had the great pleasure of working closely with Nick Waser and Mary Price on a pollination biology module, Dan Blumstein and Bobbi Peckarsky on a module involving animal behavior studies at RMBL, and David Inouye on an open-ended phenology module. Summer 2011, I worked with three bright and committed students from Chaffey Community College - Rebecca Baetzel, Danny Santiago, and Emily Thorne - who helped develop and test curriculum and made some great videos for the website, in addition to their intense summer research projects. Making RMBL data accessible and intuitive is not easy - my web team has been essential in this task. Dan Jones and Ceci Ervin deserve a round of applause for their creative ideas and hard work - especially the hard work of translating my crazy ideas into web-realities. My gratitude extends to many others, including our project collaborators and co-investigators, as well as the hard-working RMBL staff.

I have really enjoyed my time at RMBL so far. I’ve met many interesting people and delved into some first class research. The creative process of turning data into curriculum, and telling certain parts of the RMBL story, has been consuming and fascinating. I look forward to working with the RMBL community to continue improving Digital RMBL and maybe even doing some interesting science of my own along the way.