Notes

Status for September 8

08 Sep 2016

I’ve been using this open lab notebook for over a year now. Crazy how the time has flown by. I’m not sure I hit the mark on what I originally intended it to be. At times I worry that it’s a glorified to-do list, opaque to anyone except me. I’ll work towards making it more transparent in the future.

What have I worked on?

  • tempVarInfection: John came back with minor comments, incorporated, and manuscript is ready to re-submit.

  • networkEWS: pushed along further. Added effect of thresholding dispersal, interspecific competition (both abundance and per capita effect, as they may have different impacts), and negative/positive competitor dependent dispersal. Letting run overnight because I still don’t have access to a cluster.

  • rangeShape: Pushed along plotting and conceptual aspects of this work. Fixed environmental distance calculation, but haven’t tested it out enough.

  • reading/thinking: I’d really like to look more into the effect of host switching on host-parasite network dynamics and co-extinction, but this is vague. I keep re-reading this paper and thinking that there are still many open questions. The predator-prey model used may not be the best for host-parasite interactions, and no empirical networks were examined (not that we’d have parameter estimates for empirical data, but the link structure and distribution of strong and weak interactions may be really important). Also, why would re-wiring come at an inherent cost? What if re-wiring was simulated as a last ditch effort; meaning that parasites shift their preference towards other known species until their abundance drops below a threshold, at which they switch hosts based on some low probability, and the host that they switch to is similar to the current permissive host set. Maybe this is injecting too much biology into the modeling effort, but some of these things could make for nice extensions.

What should I be working on now?

  • parasiteRange: continue to develop skeleton protocol

  • rangeShape: test out env distance function. How do spatial and environmental distance relate? Is this relationship reduced at larger spatial scales/ larger geographic range sizes?

Listening to: