Thesis and Research Thoughts

I have no idea why but the topics for today: my research and thesis. I don't know what it is about doing a thesis but whenever I mention it, people seem to look at me as if I had just told them that I was some mad scientist. What's up with people thinking that doing research is something scary and intimidating? Granted, I've been doing it for the last 3 years and it did take some getting used to, but I still have trouble understanding what is there to fear.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm doing research on exploring the utility of remote sensing in modelling evapotranspiration. To be more specific, I am looking at various reflectance features in the visible and near-infrared range to see how they tie in with plant ecophysiology. My current (and soon to be wrapped-up) project (aka my thesis) is to develop a simple remote-sensing driven model that also incorporates micrometeorology data to model evapotranspiration in chaparral. Why? Basically I wanted something that's simple to implement along the lines of straight linear regression-based models but still captures the dynamics and mechanics of the ecosystem along the lines of popular models like SEBAL or SiB2. In other words, a model that explores more of the nuts-n-bolts than an empirical remote sensing model but doesn't have hassle of dozens of variables that have to be modelled themselves.

Anyway, enough spewing about my research for now... and is it me, or is there some kind of social stigma attached to doing ecological research, especially when it involves ecosystem process modelling?

My brain's starting to groan at me again, but it's a bit too late at night and the weather's not quite up for my natural stress relief. I really need to spend more time shooting -- my hunting instincts are driving me absolutely batty and I miss the caress and eagle-like authority of my trusty bow...

March Madness

Things have been extremely hectic these days so I haven't quite been keeping up with this and I didn't even get to do my usual finals-mania ranting! I don't think I'll be doing too much work here for a while because I am under super time pressure to do my thesis, but I thought I'd put something up for whatever reason I'm feeling like doing so. I have officially committed to the PhD program in Interdisciplinary Ecology at the School of Natural resources at University of Florida.

I had something in mind but I completely forgot after repeated phone calls from random criters. I'll probably post it when I'm absolutely sick of working on my thesis, which I'm not somewhat behind in...

... And now time to keep the ranger in me in check long enough to actually finish my thesis!