Week 3/4 - Jake Brisnehan

     At this point in the year, ticks aren't out nearly as much, so it's hard to get great numbers for our mark-recapture study this year. We have stopped fieldwork for the study and are now working on the data we collected from last year and this year. My colleague, Jon Wegryn, and I have been looking into different factors of the understory that may be correlated with tick presence or abundance. I have been researching some statistical models to capture the data as well. So far, it seems that a zero-inflated, mixed-effect model is going to be the best option for our data, but I'm curious to see what parameters will have the largest effects on our data and what correlations are present. 

    In my free time, I have also been looking into Bayesian Statistics. As I learn more, it seems that there could be some application to this study as well, but I'll have to do more research and keep learning to see if that's true. Overall, it has been really interesting looking at our data and seeing what possible results may be coming out of it. No matter the outcome, I am happy to be getting some experience with such an exciting project and dataset.