Letter

• Submitted public university funding letter to Frontiers in Ecology and Environement. Follow up in a week.January 9, 2012

Warning signals

• Read Bel et. al. (2012) "Gradual regime shifts in spatially extended ecosystems." and discussed with Carl. Interesting. Shows a simple model of transition between spotted spatial patterning and uniform landscapes, describes the "snaking" bifurcation pattern between the two. Might be applicable to pollen stuff below.

Pollen

• Read Williams et. al. (2010), "Rapid responses of the prairie-forest ecotone to early Holocene aridity in mid-continental North America." Looks like a good paper to use to select pollen datasets from. %AP (arboreal pollen) might be the appropriate response variable here.
• Messed around the North American Pollen Database (NAPD) trying to understand its structure. At first everything seemed to be in an old Paradox database format, but downloaded the raw ASCII files via their FTP
• Found the "stratiagraph" R package for working with NAPD files. Should use it tomorrow to extract the Williams sites and calculate %AP across them.
• New gitub repository for this work (nothing in it yet)