The "Off Season"

Now that data=collection in the field is over for the 2015 season, it is time to sort out all the other elements of post-doc life that field work usually pushes lower down the priority list. In an act of bravery, I pulled out a draft of a senior thesis of a Barnard student from a few years ago to evaluate how we (myself, Julia, the undergraduate who is now a masters student, and Hilary Callahan, her advisor at Barnard) can dust it off and make it ready for submission. This study examined neighbor impacts on plastic traits in ecotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana, and harvest whole plants (roots included!) at two time points. It is an extrodinary dataset, and confronts many issues that can be lacking from single-harvest, non-competitive plasticity studies, and I think it will have a bright future in journal in the *near future* (fingers crossed). It is often scary to dive back into old manuscripts, or projects that have been left in the "guilt closet" - a term my advisor used to describe that space where things you don't have time for, forgot to prioritize, or are just avoiding for a while, go to rest. Even just as a post-doc, this guilt closet of mine is increasing in size, and the "off season", or non-field work season, is a good time to start digging things out of there. But man, opening that closet is always scary. 

Another thing I'm looking forward to in the upcoming months is attending AGU, or the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting in San Francisco. I attended AGU my last year of grad school and presented a poster on canopy effects in tundra shrubs. The scene at AGU was a bit overwhelming - it often draws over 20,000 scientists (I believe, no hard stats on this), who work on everything ranging from remote sensing, deep-ocean vents, volcanos, and sustainable development. It covers such a wide variety of topics, that I found it hard to select the best sessions. This year, I'll be giving a talk on my work with the global R-T dataset in a session entitled: "Photosynthesis and Respiration at Leaf, Ecosystem, Regional, or Global Scales: Constraints, Measurements, and Modeling II". The first half of the organized session focuses a lot on scaling from canopy to regional fluxes of respiration and photosynthesis, and the second half of the session focuses more on leaf-level processes that should be incorporated into these models. I just checked the line up, and it includes many people I know and admire and seem to be floating in the same circles, including Xi Yang at Brown, Rick Wehr at Harvard/ASU, and Paul Gauthier at Princeton. I think having this base of plant physiologists that scale will really make the meeting more enjoyable, and fruitful in terms of making contacts and developing projects. Also, this session will be very informative in terms of learning more about COS exchange and SIF modeling, which I hope to delve into more in the future.