A Week At Work (1)

High school students on Skype a Scientist have asked me a few times what an average day looks like for me. But it's hard to find an "average" day, so what I'll do instead is describe an average week. This week should fit pretty nicely.

​If you read my About Me page or my Research page, you know I study how climate change affects cattle production in the U.S. Great Plains, a large agricultural region in the central US, between Canada, Mexico and the Gulf Coast, the Rocky Mountains, and the Mississippi. I study data to understand how future changes in temperature and rainfall affect where and how well natural vegetation grows in the Great Plains. Because we're concerned about ranching, I'm not so much interested in shrubland and forests, but mostly grassland, which ranchers use as feed for their cattle. 

I'm mostly a data analyst, and our first goal is to publish our work in scientific journals so other researchers can read about it and use it in their own work. These journals are like newspapers for scientists, except they're much harder to understand. We also go to scientific conferences a few times a year to present our work, meet colleagues, and learn about their research (and we get to see some fascinating places, too). We just finished working on two papers, about how past droughts have affected cow numbers in the Great Plains and how grasslands in the Great Plains will change in the future, and we submitted them to two journals for review. It'll probably take a month or so until we hear back from them.

As one of the leaders in our project, I am also interested in the bigger picture, and I am responsible to determine what to do next. Last week, after we finished our second paper, my postdoctoral advisor and I brainstormed about what to do next.

One thing we are trying to understand is what our projections mean for ranchers and their operations. Our data are really just millions of numbers, for every year from 2020 to 2099 arranged in a raster grid across the Great Plains. They can be really abstract if you don't organize them in a smart way.

That's what I'll do this week, plus dealing with smaller things that occur each day.

Here's Monday.