Echinaceas and… Geometry?

Happy Saturday, Flog!

Seeing as it is the weekend, I, unfortunately, do not have any pictures of us hard at work in the field (you’ll have to ask team CoW Bee for those). What I do have, however, are screenshots of my contribution to the project today.

While, undoubtedly, my favorite part of being on the Echinacea team is the awesome field work we get to do, I can’t deny what cool things one can do with a computer as well. For the past week, I have been getting back into the groove of using R, the statistical coding software that we use for analysis of the data we collect in the field. This weekend I was given the simple task of drawing a polygon, in R, around some of our points. Easy, right?

The points in question (then some extras)

So first I isolated the points in question.

So far so good!

Then, I wrote the command in R to draw a polygon around these points. And with an extra line of code, I even added a 5-meter buffer around the whole shape. With this polygon drawn, we can now very quickly isolate these points (which all happen to be Echinacea pallida), and do further analysis on them, and any other plants we may find in the polygon area in the future! So without further ado, I present, the polygon!

Whoops

At some point soon I know I’ll be able to figure out how to draw the polygon around these points, but for now it’s back to the drawing board (or coding board).

Thanks for reading!

Michael