As of Friday morning — rhododendrons, azaleas, violets. Things are blooming so fast I don’t even have time to look up the Latin names. So interesting that the rhododendron bloom is pink before it opens up to be white and yelow. What’s the adaptationist story there? Unfortunately, our rhodos have all fallen to some sort of fungus. These are a wan attempt to regrow but half the bush is already brown and withered.

And (boo hiss) the garlic mustard is attempting to take over. Time to break out the salad recipes.

On the ECOLOG-L list the other day, Andrew Richardson posted a call for people/organizations with webcams to consider joining their monitoring network:

We are conducting a “near” remote sensing project to monitor vegetation
phenology using webcam images. We have established a network of about a
dozen sites in the northeastern US and adjacent Canada, and we are
archiving daily images from these cameras (for a map of sites, and some
sample images, see http://www.forest.sr.unh.edu/richardson/#Towercam).

By separating camera images into red, green and blue color channels, we
are able to extract seasonal signals of spring green-up as well as autumn
coloration and senescence (see my 2007 paper in Oecologia for details).

How cool to be able to automate this data gathering process.

In an email exchange he also encourages individual contributions:

If phenology is of interest to you, I’d urge you to consider contributing
to the Northeast Regional Phenology Network (NE-RPN) which is part of the National Phenology Network.

Jargon aside, phenology has to do with the timing of life events, such as flowering, setting seed, nesting, etc.

I’m going to take a look, though my own gathering of data is likely too slipshod for their needs. When I get a chance I’ll try to evaluate what they have and post results here. In the meantime, check it out yourself.

Our bleeding hearts began blooming recently. I noticed them on Tuesday, but my husband reports that he saw a neighbor’s in bloom on Saturday.

In sad news, I must report that Antoinette the Ant Lion is definitely no longer among the living. Upon the recommendation of Akito Kawahara, I went to separate the two lions. Apparently they don’t actually specialize in ants, but will attempt to kill anything that falls into their pit. There were two nice pits in the bowl, but I guess that both were made by our as yet unnamed acquisition from Texas. Antoinette was motionless when I dug her out of the sand, but that’s not unusual. However, she is still motionless atop the sand in the new jar two days later. So, we cannot say exactly when she expired, or why. She will be missed.

bench in the pink circle

Originally uploaded by cyanocorax

After a couple of days of heavy rains, most of the crabapple petals have been brought to the ground in a vivid pink carpet.

Meanwhile, our dogwoods started to bloom yesterday. They aren’t too photogenic yet, and because of the rain won’t mesh as nicely with the crabapple.

How do people find the time to write voluminous blog posts? It is all I can do to jot down sketchy notes.

1) The bunnies in our parsley planter have disappeared, we presume they hopped away and were not just eaten by the crows (one of which was lurking yesterday while mama rabbit visited and a suspected daddy rabbit was trying to entice her away to start the next clutch — or whatever those furry things create when they reproduce (says the ornithologist))

2) Today the following started blooming near our house: a big cherry, the grape hyacinths, and the crabapple in the circle.

dc tulip

Originally uploaded by cyanocorax

As usual, blooms elsewhere are way ahead of our yard, which appears to be shady and have poor soil.

The pears along I-95 have been blooming for at least two weeks.
Forsythia in our area has been blooming for at least a week, probably more.
Tulips were in full bloom outside the Department of Justice in DC when I took this photo March 27th.

And our daffodils just started to bloom yesterday.

Things are going to get awfully busy now. Some signs of spring in the last few weeks:

A Canada goose, sitting snugly on her eggs in the Greenbelt Metro Station parking lot (area 4c), as early as 4 March.

Blooming crocuses, just in the same spot where I saw them last year.

Spring peepers at the vernal pond. Unfortunately, I just checked for the first time on 10 March and though they were silent at 6:15pm, they started chorusing around 6:30pm.

Photos and video to be posted when I find the darn cable for my little camera.

weevil

Originally uploaded by cyanocorax

This clever little fellow dropped, a dead and dry husk, onto my printout as I was geocaching near Desert National Wildlife Refuge. I later realized I am working on a project that involves digitized plates and descriptions of weevils from Central America. I found a couple of possible genera, then Googled them. Not a thing. Perhaps the names have changed since 1911.

the black spot

Originally uploaded by cyanocorax

A few weeks ago I spotted this interesting sight from the air. Will post coordinates later. I looked it up on Google Earth and it looked different. Not sure I found the same spot.

Speaking of spots, wonder how to make an observation of this!

Encyclopedia of Life tried to launch yesterday but was immediately crippled by unexpectedly large crowds of visitors. David Shorthouse writes in the EOL Blog (which does still work):

We’re too Popular!
David Shorthouse
February 26th, 2008

You may have noticed that the EOL site has been flaky at best since approximately 12 EST this afternoon. Although we are serving the site from a load balanced cluster of several machines, we are experiencing phenomenal loads.

I just churned through the web logs from web machines in this cluster and there were 5.8M hits in the span of 3 hours. Most of these happened within 1 hour. We were down (and continue to experience intermittent access) for a few hours, then flipped the machines back on. Since then, there were an additional 5.7M hits, totaling 11.5M hits since 9AM this morning and it is now 2:45PM here. Wow!

We are working hard to resolve the issue so stay tuned and please have patience! I’ll post updates here as the day progresses.

I haven’t gotten a chance to see the site yet. My sources told me a month ago that it was done and they were shock testing it. I’m sorry they didn’t have the network infrastructure to handle the massive reaction from the public. On the one hand, it is embarrassing to be caught unprepared like this. On the other hand, it is testimony to the public demand for this kind of information (although one wonders how many journalists it takes to crash a website).

On the positive side, I expect the kinks to be worked out in the next few days. Unlike a failed NASA mission, the show can and will go on. The data are all still there and lessons learned can be applied next time. However, EOL anticipates a total re-engineering and so should expect many more bumpy roads ahead. For example, imagine the possible problems when the site goes semantic and is dynamically drawing information from other sites which are not nearly as well funded (it isn’t clear to me how much of the current implementation is dynamic).

Rod Page admits he is intentionally hypercritical in his review. Much of what he calls for is already planned, though he is concerned at the ability of the team to deliver.

I think the first release of EOL should have, at a minimum, provided at least as much information that I can get from iSpecies and Wikipedia. Other projects, such as Freebase, have pre-populated their databases with content from Wikipedia and other sources. Why didn’t EOL? If the argument is that they want authenticated content, then this doesn’t wash. Their authenticated content is minimal, and waiting for authentication will, in my view, cripple EOL.

EOL’s web site has no mechanism for people to extract data (e.g., RSS feeds, microformats, links to RDF, etc.). It’s intended to be read by humans, not machines. This greatly diminishes its utility.

The real question is how much the issues I’ve raised are things which are easy to fix given time, or whether they reflect underlying problems with the way the project is conceived.

I would point out that yes, the EOL is intended for humans not machines. The original sources from which the data come ought to be machine readable in the first place in order for EOL to get the data. That will be a huge challenge in itself, and a place where EOL can help. EOL eventually will be generating RDF, which itself is not difficult if you know how you want it to look. And then data harvesters will have to sort out which source is the best when the same data appear in multiple places.

Carl Zimmer, who wrote the New York Times blurb, sounds much more optimistic in his blog entry.

I would not be surprised that the interests of communities within biology drive a lot of the growth of the encyclopedia. If the kinks are worked out, it could be a tool that a group of people interested in, say, orchids, could use to store and study their data. Seen that way, it wouldn’t have to hit all 1.8 million species pages to achieve something important.

I could not agree more. The challenge, as I’ve stated before, is engaging those communities and providing tools (perhaps more than just one option!) so that they can not only easily create and moderate the content, but get some payback from it themselves. They don’t need to be on board with the EOL directly, but be producing content that plays nicely with EOL. Note that I have a vested interest. All of the projects I know have a hard time getting their communities on board, and they all have distinct aims and system architectures. We are all poised to see how we can funnel our efforts toward EOL without bankrupting ourselves. Can we use EOL to leverage success on our projects? It isn’t going to be easy, or cheap.

I do notice that the blog contains several observations I could get onto the semantic web by making SPOTs for them. For example, YouTube videos of honey badgers making tools in India, assisted by honeyguides, and allegedly causing problems in Basra, Iraq. Because these are very far removed from the original sources and have poor locality data, they are low quality observations. However, for demonstration purposes, they might be useful.