Hi, I’m Simon Rolph
I’m a PhD student at the University of Sheffield. I am a plant population biologist interested in how comparative analyses of population models can provide insight into fundamental and applied questions about the nature of life history trade-offs and responses to environmental change. I am always exploring new ways to visualise life history data and I am an advocate of open-access and reproducible research.
I’m a huge fan of botanical gardens and I have a terrible habit of taking lots of pictures of plants and never getting around to identifying them. I also like trains.
What do I study?
Background: we observe an impressive diversity of life history strategies across the tree of life.
Opportunity: decades of population biology has resulted in data on the demography of hundreds of plants and animal species.
Aims: how can we use this demographic data, alongside a plethora of population modelling techniques, to ask fundamental and applied questions about life history strategies?
Resources, notes, ramblings…
Simon's Git(Hub) Reference
Git and GitHub Commands that I use repeatedly. Despite this, I fail to remember them, so here they are for when I forget.
Visualising Matrix Population Models as Sankey Diagrams: a First Attempt with R Package riverplot
On a quest to visualise the flow of matrix population models