Nature Guide to Ulleungdo

I have officially published my second book! It is a smaller, more condensed version of the Natural History Guide to Ulleungdo, but it still contains all the information and pictures. Plus it's only $35! Here it is:

Nature Guide to Ulleungdo

Pocket Guide to Ulleungdo

I am excited to announce that I am working on a pocket guide for Ulleungdo. It will be a condensed version of the natural history guide and will be smaller and more affordable. Exciting stuff!

Adventures in GIS

Recently I have been thinking of a possible project for grad school, and I've decided to try linking Ulleungdo and the Pacific Northwest through some sort of anthropogenic reforestation premise with a focus on biodiversity indexes. That's a long way off, but I decided to jump into GIS and create a map of different vegetation types. To do it, I used QGIS to create ndvi maps of Ulleungdo in both July and April. Using the July ndvi map, I was able to digitize an area for total vegetation cover, since everything is leafed out at that point. Then I used the April ndvi map to digitize evergreen areas (darkest values), then mixed areas (gray values). I'm using the blanket term "evergreen canopy" and not "coniferous cover" to include broadleaf evergreens such as Camellia japonica. After that I had some trouble with the difference tool in QGIS but GRASS came to my rescue (surprising since I had been fighting with it about rasters to no avail). By removing intersecting polygons (evergreen/mixed) from the overall vegetation polygon I was able to get deciduous vegetation. The result is a beautiful map of vegetation cover that I hope to supplement with more field research.

Yay for open source GIS!

More pottery

Some new/in progress pottery

Pottery

I've been getting into pottery a lot more recently and I'm going to try selling some things when I get my inventory up.