Schmidty
Notes

A few years ago the Bureau of Land Management office I worked for was part of a project to map vegetation in Sage-grouse habitat. To do that we got 10 cm resolution aerial imagery across the species range. The following is a summary of the project, what I learned, what I would do differently, and why the project ended without ever really contributing to any on the ground management.

In my last post I wrote about how I started blogging because of Chris Coyier. In this post I'm going to copy something he used to do, which was a post a "Chronicle". A Chronicle was essentially just a list of the things he was using in his day-to-day work at that moment or anything else he wanted to share. I'm going to do the same here and, hopefully, in the future.

I started blogging because of one person: Chris Coyier. Well I guess two people, Chris Coyier mostly, but also some guy named Tim who made Timothy Training.

I have been less enthusiastic about predicting if the Dolores will have a raftable release this year due to an average snowpack. In January there was a potential for a release when the model was predicting 20 days. But other than that the model has been fairly pessimistic. In the last couple of days the model has had some really high predictions, above 40 days. I think either the model thinks that we are close to having enough snow to have a release or there was some sort of weird reading at the snotel sites. Either way, I would say that there is a chance the Dolores runs this year, but I'd guess it is unlikely.

I need to get some data hosted through Google Earth Engine. I’ve played around with the javacript and python libraries, but at heart I’m an R developer and would prefer to use earth engine in R if I can.

It's been quite the year. By far the biggest in my life. I raised a baby from newborn to toddler, I got a new job with the Forest Service, leaving the BLM and my Dolores office after 15 years, moved from Dolores to Durango, demolished a house, and designed and started building a new house. That is a lot of big things and at times it felt like too many big things. But I'm happy for all of them.

I’ve long wanted to get better at statistics. And largely I have. But I still have a long way to go. I feel like I’m the best at machine learning type stuff, mostly using decision trees. The predictions seem to be the best. But I’m not really in to prediction as much as I am into learning about the relationships that exist in the world. A lot of machine learning is a black box.