I’ve updated the Thermimage package.  The recent update includes calculations for modelling heat transfer from radiative and convective heat transfer from the animal to the environment, using temperatures captured from infrared thermal images.

The assumption is that the user already has temperature information captured and is simply using R to to analyse temperatures.  I am working on scripts for importing FLIR images into R but these are not yet included in Thermimage, since these scripts rely on external applications (EXIFTOOL) that have implementation issues in R.  (Edit: July 20, 2016, v 2.2.0 has a function for importing FLIR thermal jpgs for processing in R)

Thermimage is on Cran now at the following url:

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Thermimage/index.html

Sample scripts on how to put the heat transfer equations to use are at:

https://github.com/gtatters/Thermimage/blob/master/heatcalc.R

I’ve also included a script to “test” the validity of the thermal image calculations where I convert the binary thermal image data into temperature:

https://github.com/gtatters/ThermimageCalibration/blob/master/ThermimageCheckCalculations.R

Any issues with the code can be raised here:

https://github.com/gtatters/Thermimage/issues

It’s been a busy two weeks in the lab, courtesy of my hard working graduate students.  Susan, Justin and Anne presented their thesis research at the Ontario Ecology and Ethology Colloquium last week.  Here are some screen shots of their abstract titles.

Then, this past week, the lab attended the Canadian Society of Zoologists conference to present our research.  Justin and Susan represented the lab work at Brock, while Cayleih Robertson (PhD student of Grant McClelland at McMaster) presented her work (a collaboration I’m happy to be part of).  Everyone gave excellent talks and appeared to enjoy the conference and workshops.

Susan Wang received an honourable mention for the CAS Lindsay Prize for best oral presentation in the Parasitism, Immunity, and Environment section. We’re all very proud of her!

Finally, although Dimitri Skandalis left the lab a number of years ago, I was very pleased that Dimitri received the William S Hoar Award for best overall student presentation at the CSZ this year.    Here is is looking especially happy, as are his past and current supervisors (Left to Right: Darveau, Skandalis, Tattersall, Altschuler).

Congratulations to Ian Black for successfully defending his MSc thesis from research in my lab.   Ian’s thesis was entitled “Orientation Preference and Behavioural Thermoregulatory Coordination in Pogona vitticeps”.

 

 

Many thanks to Dr. Jacqueline Litzgus (Laurentian University) for being his external examiner and giving a fair and comprehensive assessment of his work.  Also thanks to Dr. Joffre Mercier, Dr. Robert Carlone and Dr. Alan Castle, committee members and defence committee for their gruelling questions.

I want to take this chance to thank Ian for being a member of the lab and for making it to this stage.  You will always be part of the lab and I wish you all the best in the future.  Enjoy the freedom of reaching a milestone.

Welcome to the new webpage! Over the next little while, we will be moving content over from the university server to this wordpress site!

Please bear with us during this period of transition.