Watching The Sea /  by Michael Johns

Well, I'm back on the Farallones for another seabird season, and so begins another series of stories from the field. I've decided this year to briefly describe all of the different projects we do out here during the summer. From simple tasks such as taking the weather, to complex tasks like keeping track of 400+ Cassin's auklet nest boxes. To kick off this series, I choose one of my favorite morning rituals, "sea watch". Every morning, the designated sea watch person (Katie in the case of the photo above) sets up a 50x spotting scope on the front porch of the PRBO House where we live, orients it southwest over the marine terrace, and watches the sea for a standard 5-minute period. The idea is to count any pelagic species other than the ones that breed on the island that pass through the fixed field of view, to get a sense of long-term changes in the timing and abundance of seabirds that use the waters around the Farallones. 

Visualizing Effort on SEFI /  by Michael Johns

As the name would suggest, long-term datasets take a long time to develop. Not only does it take a continuous supply of resources to support the work, someone has to physically go out every year and collect the data. To visualize the time investment and sheer number of people required to collect 50 years of seabird and marine mammal data, I designed this circular bar plot, illustrating the extreme commitment by some and small contributions by many over the years. It depicts the total number of days spent on Southeast Farallon Island (SEFI) by current and former staff and interns of PRBO (now Point Blue Conservation Science). Each concentric circle radiating from the map of SEFI in the center represents an additional 500 days of service, with Pete Warzybok in the lead at over 2,000 days! To keep the plot from getting too cramped, I narrowed the number of names displayed to just partial or full PRBO associates with more than two months spent on island, so this plot excludes many more island residents affiliated with various agencies, contracts, and universities, as well as people with brief stints – sorry if that applies to you. The graphic was created entirely with the ggplot2 package in R, aside from the border and line below the title that were added later in Photoshop. A high resolution 16 x 20 .png file of the graphic can be downloaded here: DOWNLOAD FILE 

La Paz /  by Michael Johns

The Pacific Seabird Group puts on an annual conference to bring together scientists and students studying seabirds around the Pacific. Last year the conference was held in rainy Tacoma Washington. This year it was held in sunny La Paz, on the southern end of Baja California Mexico (see map below). I used the timing and location of this year's conference to give a talk on my double brooding work with Cassin's auklets, and take a much needed vacation from Fairbanks with Casey before I head out to the Farallones for another summer field season. Once the conference ended, we spent much of our time wading through the thigh-deep turquoise water of Balandra Beach, lounging in the sand, hiking among cacti, birding the Malecon, and drinking margaritas. 

The highlight of our trip was the chance to swim with the world's largest fish, the whale shark. These massive filter feeders can reach lengths of up to 40 feet, and are found in warm tropical waters throughout the world. According to a paper by Ramírez-Macías and colleagues published in 2012, La Paz is one of several sites in the Sea of Cortez where predominately juvenile whale sharks congregate to feed in shallow plankton-rich waters. The site is a short panga ride from La Paz, on the north side of a long sand spit called El Mogote. We spent roughly 40 minutes watching a small (20 foot?) male slowly strain tiny plankton from the surface waters, which during this time of year felt less tropical and more temperate. The photo below was taken in Bahia de los Angeles, another important juvenile staging area further north, during my first encounter with whale sharks in 2006. 

The images above, in order of appearance are: marbled godwits, magnificent frigatebird, tricolored heron, reddish egret, yellow-footed gull (eating a puffer fish), unknown mangrove crab, parade of brown nudibranchs found at low tide in the mangroves (presumably breeding). 

Map of Baja California created with ggplot2 in R. Colored regions indicate topography of land, grays indicate bathymetry of the sea, for those not familiar with the region. La Paz is tucked away on a shallow bay at the southern tip on the Sea of Cortez side. The color pallette for this plot was inspired by the local geology.

Data Into Art /  by Michael Johns

R is an open source statistical computing and graphics platform, where tasks are implemented through a coding language entered by the user. The flexibility of R is limited only by the collective ability of its community of users to dream up new functions and functionality; which means its potential is basically limitless. It has become the environment for researchers to carry out statistical analyses and produce publication-ready figures. 

Inspired by some cool new plots floating around the internet that mimic Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" 1979 album cover, I created the above image of Southeast Farallon Island using a new R package developed to better visualize changes in distributions over time. The image depicting the the change in elevation across a range on longitude for each line of latitude was produced with the packages ggplot2 and ggridges, using a dataset containing elevation information of the island at equally spaced points of lat and long. An example of using R for more than just stats and figures, creating something that could even pass for art. 

Download this .asc file and use this code to recreate the above image in R. 

Here's another way of looking at the same dataset using geom_polygon in ggplot2, where each polygon is colored by latitude. This shows the vertical relief of the island from the perspective of the waterline, looking north. The tallest peak at just over 100 meters is the top of Lighthouse Hill. The second largest at just below 75 meters is Maintop, which is separated from the main island by a very narrow channel. 

M + C Seattle Wedding /  by Michael Johns

Casey and I got engaged on New Years Eve, while dancing to "Auld Lang Syne" during the first minutes of 2017. Shortly after we began the process of planning the wedding. I'm generally marooned on remote islands in the spring and summer, so our window was limited to the fall and winter. We were living in Fairbanks, Alaska at the time, and didn’t want to make our guests endure possible 20 below temps, so it also needed to be somewhere south. We eventually settled on Seattle for several key reasons: 1) a large selection of venues, 2) a large selection of good food and beer, 3) a big airport nearby for our out-of-town guests (which included ourselves and most everyone else), and 4) we had close friends and family in or near Seattle that could help. Here is a selection of our favorite images from what turned out to be a perfect evening, courtesy of Daniel and Lindsay, our photographers at Stark Photography.

 
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After combing through countless venues online, we finally stumbled upon MadArt Studio, an industrial loft space located in the heart of Seattle. The studio exists as an empty canvas for modern artists to create large exhibitions, and between shows the open space is advertised for events. It has huge wooden ceilings, brick walls, exposed steel beams, and massive windows that look out onto Westlake Avenue. A perk to MadArt is a huge top floor penthouse available through Airbnb, which made for the perfect refuge. 

We both wanted suits we could wear again after the wedding. I went with a blue birds eye wool suit from Suit Supply, and Casey found a brown tweed suit from Oliver Wicks, and a local Fairbanks taylor took them in to size. 

Mixed in with the rented white table cloths and wooden fold out chairs were some personal touches, such as 4 home brewed wedding beers with custom labels from our friends Kyle and Alexis, boutonnieres by our friend and speech giver Laura, and ceramic party favor plates stamped with our wedding logo made by our friend and officiant Rachel. Collecting and assembling all of the decorations and table settings was a group effort by friends and family.

We walked down the aisle to the music “Stable Song” by Gregory Alan Isakov, a song that has a lot of meaning to the two of us. The ceremony was kept short and sweet. Rachel, our officiant,  wrote a nice passage about love and relationships, we exchanged our own personal vows, said the "I dos", and each put a ring on it. 

We both think Wes Anderson films are the greatest, and choose this rendition of "Wigwam" by Bob Dylan from the soundtrack for The Royal Tennenbaums for the recessional. It was cued just before we kissed, and the trumpets kicked in as we walked out passed our guests. 

The first dance was one of those traditional wedding elements we decided to keep, and used the song "Let it be me" by Ray LaMontagne. We had willing guests join us on the dance floor half way through the song, and kicked off the live funk band Solbird immediately after. This is where my memory of the night gets fuzzy. 

photographers - Stark Photography // venue - MadArt Studio, South Lake Union Seattle, WA // catering - Madres Kitchen // band - Solbird // cake - Bakery Nouveau // event rentals - Pedersens Rentals // Mike's suit - SuitSupply // Casey's suit - Oliver Wicks // printed materials - Paperless Post //