# What is this stuff?

A brief introduction for anyone who might stumble across this blog. I’m a paleontologist and evolutionary ecologist at the California Academy of Sciences. One of my main areas of research is the reconstruction of paleocommunities and food webs, and the relationship(s) between those structures and extinction. It’s a very difficult topic for a number of reasons, some related to data availability, but mostly mathematical. I therefore tend to keep a series of notebooks, logging all my work. One of my other activities here at the Academy is writing the Climate Change Blog, and it occurred to me that perhaps I could use WordPress to blog my research notes! (duh). A quick search on Google told me that WordPress has $\LaTeX$ capabilities, and so here I am.

### 2 thoughts on “What is this stuff?”

1. David Casenove said:

Dear Peter,
My name is David Casenove. Like you, I am a paleontologist and my study of Cambrian planktonic faunas led me to investigate food webs and ecosystem structures. I am now trying to establish a quantitative method to evaluate the impact of size-selection of prey on both the connectance of food webs and the competition pressure in planktonic ecosystems.
Your blog represents in this regard a great source of inspiration. Thanks for all these useful pieces of information!

2. Thank you very much David! Your work sounds very interesting, and challenging. There’s not enough attention paid to Paleozoic plankton!