Category Archives: Uncategorized

Duck, Here Come the Big Data!

The Backstory of One Young Graduate Student’s Research By Marcella Domka In August of 2020, I started my ‘next step’ after college as a graduate student at Michigan State University. I knew from the moment I received an invitation to join the Data Intensive Landscape Limnology (DILL, find more at https://bigdatalimno.org/) lab, a lab thatContinue reading “Duck, Here Come the Big Data!”

How a walk in the park provided the “spark” I didn’t know I needed

by Ian McCullough Academic researchers are trained to package their science as neatly manicured manuscripts. We provide an overview of a topic and then describe what we did, what we found and what it all means. Rarely, however, do we hear about how an idea or project came to be in the first place. Today,Continue reading “How a walk in the park provided the “spark” I didn’t know I needed”

LAGOS Launches First US Data Modules and Twitter Campaign!

New and exciting things are happening for the LAGOS (Spanish for lakes) team. After years of hard work, their first core and extension data modules of LAGOS-US have been published. Even better, they are open access, providing the opportunity for wide and free use. The LAGOS-US research platform provides data and tools to study lakeContinue reading “LAGOS Launches First US Data Modules and Twitter Campaign!”

Citizen scientists are important contributors to species distribution data

By Patrick Hanly While citizen scientists are already known to be a vital source of water quality data, they have also been quietly amassing a substantial collection of species records through digital platforms such as the popular iNaturalist. For example, there are 900,000 dragonfly and damselfly records on iNaturalist as of August 2020. Although iNaturalist wasContinue reading “Citizen scientists are important contributors to species distribution data”

LAGOS-NE: The people behind the scenes to create an open database

We are thrilled to announce that the LAGOS-NE data paper is published, which means that the underlying data are live:  https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/doi/10.1093/gigascience/gix101/4555226 Creating something like LAGOS-NE takes a wide range of contributions, expertise, and types of work. We want to extend a HUGE thanks to everyone who contributed. This effort could not have happened without theContinue reading “LAGOS-NE: The people behind the scenes to create an open database”