Getting dressed up in full robes and a suit is not the optimal dress for the current heatwave. The reason for this nonsensical dress is of course graduation. Hundreds of our students passing through this particular rite of passage. Research-wise it has been a slower start to the summer than I might have liked. Aris has been here for the last three weeks and we have basically finished the work on badgers, cows and TB. We let Tim Benton have a look at it and he passed it on to someone in DEFRA. In an interestingly defensive email he criticized what we had done, but had to admit that they were as yet unable to do anything similar. Last week Aris, Greg and I went to Alice Holt to collect more data to make the functions linking tree growth and size to light more robust. Alice Holt is not quite as nice as Wytham and is not as well maintained, but we managed to start the exercise of collecting the additional data we need to use another ECN dataset. Greg is still working on his first manuscript, which is coming on well but still not ready for public consumption. But nothing will happen for a little while, I am off to California to ride Highway 1!
