An archive of Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie’s writing for the PLoS Ecology Community Blog
Here is the complete collection of my writing from my time as a PLoS Community Editor at the Ecology Community blog (2017-2019). The PLoS Ecology Community blog is now closed and the images from my original posts did not successfully migrate across platforms, but all my writing is now collected here.
Some personal favorites:
This is the final post from my time as a Community Editor at the PLoS Ecology Community blog. It was originally published in late December 2019.
Earlier this week I completed my Twelve Days of 2019 Ecology Literature challenge. I read the last paper on my list, drained my mug of tea, and blew out the candle. I started my advent of reading because my To Read Folder felt out of control and it seemed like the year was slipping away from me. Just as the reading ritual of sweats, tea, candle forced me to slow down and sit with some wonderful, thought-provoking papers, creating an advent calendar gave me an excuse to sit with my best intentions — I had tagged all of these papers #ToReadPile at some point in the year — and sift through the abstracts, build a ranking system, and select a top twelve to fit my end-of-the-year energy. I wrote earlier that this was the real gift. The 24 Days of Tea is pretty great (I was so enamored with it that I bought a second one and gave it to my postdoc lab) and I love a good sweatshirt (12 is not the limit of my collection), but taking the time in late November to create the list really made my December.
The list is a reflection of my twitter feed — every paper on it came from my #ToReadPile hashtag — and so it is by definition an incomplete accounting of the must-read ecology and conservation papers of (the second half of) 2019. There are way more animal papers than I, a plant ecologist, would have imagined, but apparently animals are doing interesting things. Two of my friend/mentor/colleagues wrote papers on subjects close to my heart, but with a slight twist and I enjoyed reading their work because it made me think about my own research and teaching in new ways: Meghan Duffy teaches a unit on climate change in a large (VERY large) intro bio course. I teach a whole course on the science of Climate Change to 35 non-science majors. Framing the learning objectives of these different teaching challenges as “writerly climate literacy” has given me a powerful new vocabulary for talking about my teaching philosophy. Auriel Fournier and Stephen Heard (without whom I could not have written my dissertation*) wrote a great paper on the overlooked and understudied bias in site-selection where scientists start working at a particular site because that’s where the study organism lives (and don’t work at sites where the study organism is rare). Later, re-surveys predictably record population declines since there are no re-surveys at sites that were not a part of the original study, where populations may have increased. While my floristic change studies tend to bypass this bias (I looked at resurveys of whole floras, which include taxa that were common and rare at the first time point), I just think this would be a wonderful paper to teach in a field methods or statistics class.
I also predictably read conservation papers: I turned to Peery et al. to think about science and advocacy. This letter encourages the scientific community to talk about values, biases, and science communication. We need this kind of discussion to navigate the challenges of working in conservation — a field defined by values, where “success” is often measured by how well our work translates to managers and policymakers outside of our academic bubble — but also to parse the nuanced arguments in this piece. The authors advocate for scientists to be advocates for science, but condemn advocacy-related bias in conservation science. The discussion is not over (see latest Frontiers letters).
As my Climate Change class reached the end of the semester I guess I didn’t feel depressed enough about the climate crisis, so I read Delach et al’s Agency plans are inadequate to conserve US endangered species under climate change. The conclusions are rough (the title is a spoiler), but the sheer force of cataloguing the climate sensitivity of every endangered species and poring through their agency management plans is weirdly inspiring. The paper is so well-written and clearly illustrated that I feel slightly better knowing that the authors at Defenders of Wildlife are keeping tabs on this.
To round out these papers on the failings of conservation, I read a literal literature review of project failures in conservation: Learning from published project failures in conservation. As with the Delach paper, the experience of reading Catalano et al’s review was paradoxically reassuring. I like knowing that there are very smart people out there thinking about this and shaping the discourse around how conservation moves forward —or, to put it in Auriel Fournier twitter terms, how conservation can #FailForward.
And that was my December reading list. My countdown is complete. Somehow now I’m closing in on 36, the grades have been entered, the holiday bags are half-packed, and the ADVENT folder in my Papers is just the twenty-two other 2019 papers that barely missed the top-twelve list. It’s a messy definition of “complete”, I’ll admit, but very true to form. Also, it’s not just the Twelve Days of Reading that are closing; this is the end of my run as a PLOS Ecology Community Editor. PLOS is closing the community blogs, including Ecology, at the end of the year and so this is also my goodbye post. Cue the Ghost of Paul Revere’s ‘This is the End’: I’ve been playing this song while writing this post, and I’m looking forward to seeing them live later this month. The band puts on a great show, and there is just something incredibly cathartic about stomping and yell-singing “I’M NOT OKAY” with a bunch of kids from the North Woods. So, as the lyrics says, “Well pour yourself a glass, we'll reminisce about the times we had.”
It has been a privilege to write from this platform for the past two years. Thank you to Victoria Costella and Jeff Atkins, who gave me an opportunity (and a travel stipend) as an ESA reporting fellow at the 2016 Ecological Society of America meeting. In fall 2017, when there was an opening for a Community Editor here, Jeff (a fellow Ghost of Paul Revere fan) reached out and offered support and a sounding board as I found my blogging voice. David Knutson at PLOS provided big-picture vision and small-problem trouble-shooting. Thank you, PLOS! I’ve loved the extra excuse to read beyond my typical plant ecology/mountains/paleobiology conservation key words and to think deeply about research that at first glance is, at best, tangentially related to my own work. I’m constantly amazed that I can cold-email scientists and ask them to tell me more about their research; this seems like an important lesson both in networking and in generosity. Thank you to all the researchers who have talked with me and let me share the scientific equivalent of a VH1 behind-the-music story here. Finally thank you, readers, for tagging along on this journey. It’s been a pleasure to share my thoughts with you — beyond my research and field work on public lands in Maine, you’ve shared my imaginary responses to reviewers, my penchant for breakfast foods, my complicated love for 19th century naturalists, and my struggles as a mom in academia. Thank you!
References:
Peery, M. Z., Jones, G. M., Gutiérrez, R. J., Redpath, S. M., Franklin, A. B., Simberloff, D., et al. (2019). The conundrum of agenda‐driven science in conservation. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 17(2), 80–82. http://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2006
Fournier, A. M. V., White, E. R., & Heard, S. B. (2019). Site‐selection bias and apparent population declines in long‐term studies. Conservation Biology, 33(6), 1370–1379. http://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13371
Delach, A., Caldas, A., Edson, K. M., Krehbiel, R., Murray, S., Theoharides, K. A., et al. (2019). Agency plans are inadequate to conserve US endangered species under climate change. Nature Climate Change, 1–9. http://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0620-8
Duffy, M. A., Hammond, J. W., & Cheng, S. J. (2019). Preaching to the choir or composing new verses? Toward a writerly climate literacy in introductory undergraduate biology. Ecology and Evolution, 55(4), 550–14. http://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.5736
Catalano, A. S., Lyons-White, J., Mills, M. M., & Knight, A. T. (2019). Learning from published project failures in conservation. Biological Conservation, 238, 1–10. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.108223
*Stephen’s book was my life raft. I had started reading it during my last field season, but I went into overdrive when I received a postdoc fellowship (yay!) four months before my very ambitious defense date (um…); at the time three of my four chapters were at best half-completed (one was literally just an outline), and yet, I graduated with a finished dissertation!
Spotify just told me that Superfruit was my artist of the year. “You discovered 265 new artists this year, but you really vibed with Superfruit,” Spotify Wrapped announced*. Google Scholar has not released a comparable look back at my year; there is no sleek graphic design of my year in citations. And Google Sheets is equally lagging on a social-media-sharable data visualization of my admittedly haphazard #365papers record keeping. I guess I will have to manually reflect on my reading the old-fashioned way — through blogging.
To kick off December, I created a list of twelve 2019 papers that I had really meant to read this year, but by late November were still kicking around in my ‘To Read Pile.’ Each business day in December, I’ve carved out a little time to curl up with a mug of tea, don a cozy sweatshirt, light a little candle, and read one of these papers. The ritual is so lovely. I expected this — I knew the reading itself would be a kind of reward. The challenge lay mostly in creating the list: wading through the debris of my ‘To Read Pile’ after prepping for summer conferences and fall teaching hobbled, and then assassinated, my reading habits. But once you have a list, you just have to brew the tea and show up in sweats — the paper is chosen and waiting. It is the meal prep of staying on top of the literature: a dozen tupperwares of perfectly portioned pasta, a standing line of freezer bags with curried squash soup that were frozen lying on their sides on baking pans and now stack perfectly in the freezer, a double-batch of zucchini-corn-black bean empañadas made from scratch. I will tell you from experience that those foil-wrapped freezer empañadas are doubly amazing: they are delicious and some previous version of yourself already decided what’s for dinner. I knew that making the reading list for my advent of ecological literature would be the hardest part of the 12 Days of Reading; I did not expect that I would love the gift of having a list so much.
I picked some pretty great papers — see the reviews below — but even more fundamental than the quality of the papers is the fact that they are listed and for the last seven and the next five business days I don’t need exert any mental energy on choosing what to read. I cannot recommend the act of listing enough.
If you are looking for papers to add to your list, here are some recommendations from my list: If you want to bone up on reading that will help you practice inclusion in your classroom and research, read On reporting scientific and racial history and An alternative hypothesis for the evolution of same-sex sexual behaviour in animals.
If you want to reflect on active learning in your teaching and how to help students understand the benefits of feeling uncomfortable in active learning, read Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom.
If you want to think BIG about ecology and evolution across geologic time scales, read Why mountains matter for biodiversity.
If you want to think small about local extinctions and species traits over the past century and really dig into what we can learn from historical ecological data, read Species characteristics affect local extinctions.
If you are early career and you just feel like maybe you don’t have enough imposter syndrome in your life, read Postdocs’ lab engagement predicts trajectories of PhD students’ skill development. It is extremely hard to read this paper, in which a cohort of graduate students are judged annually on a single piece of academic writing, and not try to imagine the trajectory of your own skill development. The paper models how students transition among skill levels from year to year. Honestly, I do not self-identify as a person with a simple, positive linear growth over time. I think I was among the oddball 13.1% of students that apparently decreased in skill level and then increased. But aside from the general cloud of existential reflection, I struggled with this paper because I could not reconcile the results (“PIs’ laboratory and mentoring activities do not significantly predict students’ skill development trajectories”) with the discussion’s complete lack of accountability for PIs. If a postdoc’s attendance at lab discussions is a more powerful predictor of PhD students’ skill development than the PI’s mentoring, I don’t see this as a feel-good story about the power of postdocs. (Obviously postdocs are awesome and we work wicked hard and we deserve only good things.) Postdocs are also a reflection of the PI’s mentoring; the idea that “postdocs participating in laboratory discussions” is somehow a predictor that is independent of the PI’s mentorship or lab culture seems fundamentally flawed. I was particularly put off by the suggestion that, pursuant to these results, postdocs should receive training in effective mentoring practices. In literally the next sentence, the authors admit “postdocs are underpaid relative to the value they contribute to scholarly productivity” and yet instead of a call to better compensate postdocs, they would like to add to our responsibilities.
Finally, this recommendation may be a tad over-specific, but if you want to really understand the question your committee member was working to articulate during the closed session of your dissertation defense while you made confused faces and pointed to the literature on phenological sensitivity, read On quantifying the apparent temperature sensitivity of plant phenology. (The middle author was my committee member; I totally understand his question now and it is a really freaking good one.) Happy Reading!
*Thanks for the introduction to this band, Dr. Becky Barak & the amazing group text of the Plant Love Stories team.
It occurred to me in November that my #ToReadPile was beyond overflowing. One of my friends* had recently published a very cool paper and it was receiving wonderful press, but between lesson planning, job applications, and shepherding my own manuscripts, I could not imagine carving out time or mental energy to read anything that wasn’t directly related to my own research. It seemed like so many amazing papers had come out in the second half of 2019, and I had barely had time to skim their authors’ twitter-ready one-liners, let alone their abstracts.
Friend of the blog Josh Drew has a December social media tradition he dubbed ‘OP12’ for Operation Productive December. I tweeted that I wanted to use #OP12 to read more this year, and one of my old field assistants piped up to ask about the hashtag. Drew explained on twitter, “[It is an] on-line accountability project I have to help keep me from falling into the ‘oh it's the holidays’ lull and not getting anything done for a month. The goal is to be healthy but to also make sure we get stuff done, and typically I choose fun projects to keep me entertained.”
I envisioned my reading list as a #25Daysof Fishmas or #RadventcalendaR-style project. Advent calendars are my jam — my birthday is December 24, I’m always down for daily chocolate, and as a pretty-secular parent of two young kids, I am here for a community-wide countdown awaiting a new baby**. My original plan to pick ten papers from 2019 quickly seemed adorably naive after an hour cleaning out my #ToReadPile folder yielded over three dozen new downloads. I waded back in and narrowed the list to twelve. It matches the song, though instead of reading over the traditional twelve days of Christmas, I plan to read over roughly the first twelve business days of December, wrapping up in time to put the project down at the semester’s end and grind through grading. To make this a luxe reading ritual, I bought a loose-leaf tea advent calendar and high-graded it for the twelve best-sounding flavors. I pulled my twelve comfiest sweatshirts for a reading uniform and placed my favorite Maine candles by the reading nook.
Now, instead of feeling hopelessly behind on the literature, burnt out and ready to limp into my thirty-sixth year like the old golden retriever who almost didn’t make it back in Homeward Bound, I’m looking forward to this pile of papers with a renewed sense of purpose. I’m excited to treat myself to a good read tomorrow. My December reading list will take me on a journey from my staples in plant phenology, mountains, and local extinction; I’ll dig into research on active learning and climate literacy, topics close to my teaching practice; and I’ll stretch into the culture of science, same sex behavior in animals, and big picture conservation and policy pieces.
Here are my twelve papers of Christmas, my readvent, my December literature review. Grab your mug and raid your own #ToReadPile or read these along with me. I’ll write about the journey, review the teas, and toast to a well-read December right here.
Wynn-Grant, R. (2019). On reporting scientific and racial history. Science, 365(6459), 1256.1–1256. http://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay9839
Perrigo, A., Hoorn, C., & Antonelli, A. (2019). Why mountains matter for biodiversity. Journal of Biogeography, 524(10), 300–11. http://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.13731
Feldon, D. F., Litson, K., Jeong, S., Blaney, J. M., Kang, J., Miller, C., et al. (2019). Postdocs’ lab engagement predicts trajectories of PhD students’ skill development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(42), 20910–20916. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1912488116
Zettlemoyer, M. A., McKenna, D. D., & Lau, J. A. (2019). Species characteristics affect local extinctions. American Journal of Botany, 106(4), 547–559. http://doi.org/10.1002/ajb2.1266
Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19251–19257. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821936116
Keenan, T. F., Richardson, A. D., & Hufkens, K. (2019). On quantifying the apparent temperature sensitivity of plant phenology. New Phytologist, 165, 73–8. http://doi.org/10.1111/nph.16114
Monk, J. D., Giglio, E., Kamath, A., Lambert, M. R., & McDonough, C. E. (2019). An alternative hypothesis for the evolution of same-sex sexual behaviour in animals. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 47, 1–10. http://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-1019-7
Peery, M. Z., Jones, G. M., Gutiérrez, R. J., Redpath, S. M., Franklin, A. B., Simberloff, D., et al. (2019). The conundrum of agenda‐driven science in conservation. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 17(2), 80–82. http://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2006
Fournier, A. M. V., White, E. R., & Heard, S. B. (2019). Site‐selection bias and apparent population declines in long‐term studies. Conservation Biology, 33(6), 1370–1379. http://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13371
Delach, A., Caldas, A., Edson, K. M., Krehbiel, R., Murray, S., Theoharides, K. A., et al. (2019). Agency plans are inadequate to conserve US endangered species under climate change. Nature Climate Change, 1–9. http://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0620-8
Duffy, M. A., Hammond, J. W., & Cheng, S. J. (2019). Preaching to the choir or composing new verses? Toward a writerly climate literacy in introductory undergraduate biology. Ecology and Evolution, 55(4), 550–14. http://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.5736
Catalano, A. S., Lyons-White, J., Mills, M. M., & Knight, A. T. (2019). Learning from published project failures in conservation. Biological Conservation, 238, 1–10. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.108223
**Pregnancy is tough; the last twenty-four days are generally terrible; Congratulations Mary, sincerely.
Last November, Binghamton Unversity-SUNY’s WHRW station shared this message as part of their program ‘Broadcasting World Literature’: “Today, since it’s Thanksgiving week, I thought it would be good to start off with a reading or just do a reading of a native scholar’s take on giving thanks.” Daimys Garcia explains before she begins reading from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Brading Sweetgrass,“It’s important to remember that Thanksgiving has history that’s rooted in genocide, colonization, and oppression of native peoples on this land so I thought it’d be great to read a piece by a native scholar who is thinking about thanksgiving not as the holiday but in the act of giving thanks.”
Garcia’s reading of the chapter ‘Allegiance to Gratitude’ is so beautiful — I cannot recommend listening to this episode of 'Broadcasting World Literature' enough. I echo Garcia’s sentiments that in Thanksgiving week, and Native American Heritage Month, we remember the history of this landscape, the indigenous people who were here and live here still, and the food that we’ve done our best to re-brand as thoroughly Americanized.
Whether your preparations for Thanksgiving break involve long lists of ingredients for baking marathons, hamstring stretches for turkey trots, or stacks of lab reports for grade-a-thons, somehow we have arrived in late November. I pulled together a list of on-theme academic papers to keep your cocktail hour anecdotes accurate and your sidebars over the side dishes peer-reviewed.
Here is a totally non-thorough, mostly-ecological literature review of turkeys (and the extinct poultry you might expect on a more or less accurate Thanksgiving spread), cranberries, sweet potatoes, and…ptarmigan. But — before you dig into this feast of a reading list, remember Rule 7: Respect working hours, public holidays, and vacations. This is from the recent PLoS Computational Biology paper, Ten simple rules towards healthier research labs. “Working rules commonly in place in labs around the world often mean that academics work all day long, on weekends, and even during holidays,” the author, Dr. Fernando Maestre, writes. “The stress associated with this excessive work without a life outside the lab is one of the main reasons behind the increase in mental problems in academia, particularly among early career researchers and young PIs.”
You, my friend, are ahead of the game. Relaxing with a little blog reading before Thanksgiving and making excellent life choices. Well done!
First, Americans check out turkeys on Wikipedia in November in alarming numbers. Dr. John Mittermeier and coauthors report that “pageviews for wild turkey Meleagris gallopavo show a seasonal peak in the spring and a sharp peak during the Thanksgiving holiday in the US.” This idea — that Americans are reading up on Thanksgiving turkeys year after year — was part of the inspiration behind Mittermeier’s PLOS Biology paper A season for all things: Phenological imprints in Wikipedia usage and their relevance to conservation.
If you aren’t convinced of the cultural relevance of turkeys, or question how much Americans love to look up turkeys on the internet, consider the fact that a recent PNAS paper, Characterizing the cultural niches of North American birds, had to treat google searches of turkeys as an outlier. In the Methods, they report, “After assembling estimates of relative interest for all 622 species, we normalized values so that bald eagle, the second most popular search topic, was assigned a value of 100, and all other taxa were assigned values proportionally. Wild turkey was the focus of more interest than bald eagle, but we considered the species an outlier (i.e., it received more than an order of magnitude more searches than bald eagle) and did not include it in our core analyses.”
This turkey obsession is interesting in part because it begs the question, what are we learning from Wikipedia? I recently found this tidbit on the Wikipedia page for heath hens (Tympanuchus cupido cupido) “Heath hens were extremely common in their habitat during Colonial times, but being a gallinaceous bird, they were hunted by settlers extensively for food. In fact, many have speculated that the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving dinner featured heath hens and not wild turkey.” Here’s the deal though: heath hens were about two pounds. The last population of heath hens lived (& died) on Martha’s Vineyard. I as wrote last month, I have a long-buried ecological connection to Cape Cod and its offshore islands, so while most college kids bring the emotional baggage of Pysch 101 to the Thanksgiving table, I was the know-it-all who threw down random historical ecological nuggets such as, it is unlikely that heath hens or their grassland habitats were as common in early colonial Massachusetts as some historical sources would have you believe. The story that servants refused to eat them multiple times a week is probably apocryphal. You see, I had read Interpreting and conserving the openland habitats of coastal New England: insights from landscape history in Forest Ecology and Management and — this was likely more influential since I was legitimately bad at reading papers until late in grad school — taken a seminar with the author Dr. David Foster. The paleoecological evidence does not support extensive openland vegetation in coastal New England until after European arrival. The landscape was mostly forest, and according to the preeminent expert on heath hens (here Foster and Motzkin throw in a wonderful citation from a 1928 Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History, definitely going in my #ToReadPile), the birds actually preferred, “open sandy woods and scrub oak barrens rather than grassland.” I love roping my family into this kind of argument and I am a lot of fun at parties.
But back to turkeys — I found two more great turkey papers when I searched through my records in Papers (my reference software of choice). I was a bit confused when the results included a 1943 paper in The Condor titled, “Birds Observed between Point Barrow and Herschel Island on the Arctic Coast of Alaska.” It turns out that the author, Dr. Joseph S. Dixon, was comparing male ptarmigans to turkeys: “Ptarmigan were a most important food item after a winter of fresh meat starvation. By May 13, 1914, at Humphrey Point, the males were in full breeding plumage. They cackled and strutted about like diminutive turkey gobblers. From far and near their calls were heard over the snowy plain between the sea coast and the foothills.”
If you want to go on a fascinating deep dive into the history of turkey husbandry before European settlers arrived to kick off a genocide, barely survive a winter, and two hundred years later get a national holiday declared during the Civil War, I recommend Dr. Erin Kennedy Thornton’s 2012 PLoS ONE paper Earliest Mexican Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) in the Maya Region: Implications for Pre-Hispanic Animal Trade and the Timing of Turkey Domestication. Thornton and her coauthors leverage archaeological, zooarchaeological, and ancient DNA evidence to confirm that Mayans in present-day Guatamala were raising domesticated turkeys. These turkey remains were discovered well south of the natural geographic range of the Mexican turkey, Meleagris gallopavo, which is the wild progenitor of what we know today the turkey on the Wikipedia page we check out every November — indicating that northern Mesoamerica and Maya cultural regions were engaged in animal trade as early as 300 BC–AD 100. They write, “prior information on Preclassic exchange comes primarily from non-perishable goods such as obsidian and ceramics so the non-local turkeys at El Mirador also expand our understanding of the types of goods that were exchanged long distances during this early period of Maya history.” Traveling long distances for turkey dinner is not a new idea. Mayan culture was holding it down well before the Spanish arrived and they didn’t even need to refer to a Wikipedia page each fall to get it done.
If you are looking for a paper to pair with your ancient turkeys, consider Historical collections reveal patterns of diffusion of sweet potato in Oceania obscured by modern plant movements and recombination. In this 2013 PNAS paper, Dr. Caroline Roullier and her coauthors assessed genetic diversity in modern and herbarium samples of sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) and confirmed that well before Columbus' time, Polynesian and South American peoples were sharing sweet potatoes. I love the subsection, “Did Genes and Names Disperse Together?” and the idea that linguistics is a kind of sleeper science — that names can keep information even while recombined genotypes and colonialism obscure the data. This is another powerful story of culture and food enduring; the spread on our dinner table for a celebration of settler colonialism can also be a story of resistance and resilience.
Don’t forget the cranberry sauce! It’s mountain cranberry actually, since I’m an alpine ecologist. Mountain cranberry, Vaccinium vitis-idaea, is the berry behind the beloved Ikea treat, lingonberry preserves. According to a 2017 study in Biological Conservation by McDonough MacKenzie et al. (yes, that's me), volunteers struggle to identify mountain cranberry in a citizen science project recording flowering phenology above treeline. If you want to brush up on your plant ID skills before you hit the dinner table this year, check out the supplementary materials from Lessons from Citizen Science: Assessing volunteer-collected plant phenology data with Mountain Watch — it’s a page of photos of alpine plant species and their look-alikes. Honestly, if you have a laminator lying around this could be a really beautiful Thanksgiving placemat*. Do you think google scholar counts placemats towards your h-index?
One last Thanksgiving resource. If you are struggling with how to talk to your family about climate change, Katharine Hayhoe has a webinar for you. Seriously, let's talk about climate change. This is tougher than checking out the wikipedia page for turkeys, but definitely a more meaningful discussion than the twenty-two-year-old at the table trying to school you about a heath hen you have never heard of and never claimed to be at the first thanksgiving anyway. Man, I am so much fun at parties.
References:
Dixon, J. S. (1943). Birds Observed between Point Barrow and Herschel Island on the Arctic Coast of Alaska. The Condor, 45(2), 49–57. http://doi.org/10.2307/1364377
Foster, D. R., & Motzkin, G. (2003). Interpreting and conserving the openland habitats of coastal New England: insights from landscape history. Forest Ecology and Management, 185(1-2), 127–150. http://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-1127(03)00251-2
Garcia, Daimys, "Episode 9: Rethinking Thanksgiving: A Reading of "Allegiance to Gratitude" by Robin Wall Kimmerer" (2018). Broadcasting World Literature. https://orb.binghamton.edu/broadcasting_world_literature/9
Maestre, F. T. (2019). Ten simple rules towards healthier research labs. PLOS Computational Biology, 15(4), e1006914–8. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006914
McDonough MacKenzie, Caitlin, Georgia Murray, Richard Primack, and Doug Weihrauch. 2017. Lessons from Citizen Science: Assessing volunteer-collected plant phenology data with Mountain Watch. Biological Conservation, 208, 121-126. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2016.07.027
Mittermeier, J. C., Roll, U., Matthews, T. J., & Grenyer, R. (2019). A season for all things: Phenological imprints in Wikipedia usage and their relevance to conservation. PLOS Biology, 17(3), e3000146–12. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000146
Roullier, C., Benoit, L., the, D. M. P. O., 2013. Historical collections reveal patterns of diffusion of sweet potato in Oceania obscured by modern plant movements and recombination. PNAS. http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.77148
Schuetz, J. G., & Johnston, A. (2019). Characterizing the cultural niches of North American birds. PNAS, 205, 201820670–6. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820670116
Thornton, E. K., Emery, K. F., Steadman, D. W., Speller, C., Matheny, R., & Yang, D. (2012). Earliest Mexican Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) in the Maya Region: Implications for Pre-Hispanic Animal Trade and the Timing of Turkey Domestication. PloS One, 7(8), e42630–8. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042630
*In putting together this post, I found an error in my supplementary materials! If you can find this mistake on your placemat, send me an email and I'll reward you with a Plant Love Stories sticker!
Cape Cod does not appear on my CV. I study alpine plant ecology — my postdoc research is literally founded on carrying heavy things to high lakes — and the hooked peninsula of the Cape, curling into Nantucket Sound and pointing back towards Boston Harbor, is mostly beach and salt marsh and very light on high ground.
When I’m on the Atlantic coast, I am in Acadia National Park. I grew up in central Massachusetts, where by law I think every baby shower must include a hardcover copy of Make Way For Ducklings and every childhood needs one bad sunburn from a Cape Cod beach (mine was Hyannis Port). But while I haven’t thought much about the landscape of the Cape in years (haven’t visited since 2014), this past week two journalism projects brought me back and reminded me of the Cape’s outsized influence on my own career in ecology.
First, the Cape was recently featured in a short documentary and intensely immersive online news story. Reporters from The Boston Globe spent several months this summer researching the effects of climate change on Cape Cod. They interviewed scientists, fishermen, locals, and business owners, and followed the stories of salt marshes, beach erosion, nor’easters, and changing fisheries. Nestor Ramos’ story, “At the Edge of a Warming World,” is a stunning and thorough look at climate change across the Cape, from Bourne to Provincetown. I’m teaching a course on the science of climate change for non-science majors and I rearranged my syllabus after The Boston Globe published this story. That is how much I love these pieces — five weeks into teaching a revamped course, just as I had settled into the semester, I threw out completed lesson plans so that I could devote a whole class to “At the Edge of a Warming World”. The documentary and the immersive video-and-photography online experience of Ramos’ story are only available to The Boston Globe subscribers, but you can read the story at the Pulitzer Center website — it’s part of the Center’s Connected Coastlines Initiative supporting reporting on climate change in coastal communities.
Early in “At the Edge of a Warming World” you are introduced to Liam’s, a clam shack that stood on Nauset beach since the 1950’s, and the March 2018 Nor’easter that wiped away 80 feet of beach and damaged the understructure beneath the restaurant. The building, once set way back from the ocean, barely survived the storm and the town tore it down later in the spring. Several students in my class shared their memories of Liam’s. There was this sense that a lost clam shack suddenly brought five weeks of reading and figures from the Fourth National Climate Assessment into focus. Climate change became intensely personal. The documentary is full of these moving interviews and powerful images from the Cape. I’ve never been to Liam’s, but I felt a similar nostalgia watching the ornithologists banding whimbrels in Wellfleet salt marshes.
Cape Cod is not on my CV, but it is the first place I tried field biology. Wellfleet is a part of that geography. I can’t even remember the actual field lab assignment, but in the summer of 2000 I stood ankle-deep in cordgrass and I’ve been a field biologist ever since.
Cape Cod is not on my CV, but I’m beginning to think it should be. My first field course was a summer marine biology program in high school with field trips to Cape Cod and the Maine coast. Looking back, the Maine coast obviously looms large — I’m currently a Second Century Stewardship Fellow at Acadia National Park. But the Cape Cod trip was foundational. I remember reading about the dance of ice sheets, morraines, and outwash plains in the USGS booklet Geologic History of Cape Cod and it was my first inkling that geology was ephemeral, that kettle hole ponds might hold clues to unravel the history of a place.
I loved that summer course, but at the time it was hard for me to untangle my interest in field science from the general feeling of satisfaction that two of my best friends and I had engineered a way to spend the summer together, mostly outdoors, while our parents thought we were being “productive.” None of us became marine biologists. We stayed in touch with our teacher though, and in March he emailed me to say that he had a current student working on an independent project on shark, seal, and human interactions in the Cape Cod waters. This student was writing an op-ed for the Cape Cod Times, and would I mind reading it over and offering feedback? This is how I learned about the proposed seal cull, a scheme to reduce the food supply (and thus the local populations) of great white sharks. By "simply" re-writing the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the seal cull would supposedly reduce shark attacks on the Cape. (The op-ed was published in April, by the way, and I think Emma did a great job!)
I had mostly forgotten about those spring emails and Emma’s op-ed until I began listening to Outside/In’s episode “Cold, Dark, and Sharky.” Again, I had the feeling that I possessed Cape-specific expertise that I hadn't fully appreciated, only this time it was about sharks, seal culls, and the author of Jaws. Outside/In is a podcast produced by NHPR and the Cape Cod episode dropped the day before The Boston Globe published “At the Edge of a Warming World”, but I didn’t start listening until the day I taught the Globe’s documentary short in class. When I started playing "Cold, Dark, and Sharky" on my walk back to the T after teaching I couldn’t believe the serendipitous connection — I had just spent a week re-writing my syllabus and crafting a lesson plan around climate change on Cape Cod and now I was basking in the glow of a well-taught class and listening to a new extremely well-produced story about Cape Cod.
I have another ecological connection to the Cape. My senior year of college, I took a two-semester biology seminar called Biological Conservation on Cape Cod and the Islands. The seminar was taught by a postdoc (I haven't read this PNAS paper, but I agree that postdocs are stellar mentors). I enrolled because my major (Environmental Science and Public Policy) was biology-adjacent, my friend wanted to take it and I’d already bailed on a different seminar with her*, and there would be field trips.
This seminar taught me how to read a scientific paper (laying the foundation for #365papers, one Wednesday night meeting at a time), how to core a tree, prep the core, and measure the rings with meticulous, old school — we’re talking dissecting scope and ruler-style — precision. I learned about paleoecology and palynology and the glacial geology lessons that I’d first encountered in my high school marine biology lesson slowly resurfaced. It took another decade, but eventually I did become a paleoecologist. But first, I’d reunite with the postdoc who taught that seminar; he became a professor at Emerson College. He hired me as an affiliated faculty to teach Climate Change in 2014 while I worked on my dissertation. I returned to teach Climate Change again this fall, adding Cape Cod to the syllabus.
Looking back, it appears that Cape Cod is the landscape that circuitously led me to Emerson — and perhaps my entire career? — in the first place. Reading “At the Edge of a Warming World” and listening to “Cold, Dark, and Sharky” back-to-back has been an incredible experience. There are few more nostalgia-inducing moments than teaching your first field sites to the next generation of students. But, to be able to teach with science journalism that is so deep, so well-researched, and so beautifully produced is a whole new level of nostalgia. All the emotions associated with your place are heightened and replayed in hi-fi.
The Boston Globe and Outside/In took the landscape of the Cape and the thorny, tangled relationships between people and nature in this place, and brought it all to life. I found myself remembering an esker where I ate a half-stale muffin from the bottom of my backpack, the tourist trap in Provincetown where I got a henna tattoo of the sun on my shoulder, the bakery where we stopped on the way to the ferry to core dwarf beech trees, the low light in the New Bedford whaling museum and the bright sand dunes outside.
When I tell my origin story about how I became an ecologist, I usually talk about hiking in New Hampshire, or the childhood trip when my grandparents took me to Acadia**. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned Cape Cod in those conversations. Clearly, I need to fact check my own origin story. I’m too completely in the choir to be the target audience for either “At the Edge of a Warming World” or “Cold, Dark, and Sharky”. In other words, I wasn’t surprised by the reporting; I was already familiar with most of the science in both stories. I had heard that you could earn a dollar per nose during the seal bounty days, understood that the waters around Cape Cod are warming faster than 99% of the rest of the ocean, knew that climate change made Nor’easters more powerful. But, I recognize that I am a weird case — the occasional academic Cape Cod enthusiast who has apparently forgotten, or maybe just never appreciated, the instrumental role of the Cape landscape in her scientific training. The power of the storytelling was so apparent when my students talked about their reactions to “At the Edge of a Warming World”.
The Boston Globe and Outside/In took these semi-familiar landscapes and crafted these stories that allowed me to see the Cape again from new perspectives. To have your original field site professionally science communicated back to you — twice! — is a really wonderful and jarring experience. I already appreciated the hard work of science communication in general, but these two stories impressed me in super-specific, place-based, deeply authentic ways. Read and listen to them — and support your own local science journalists. They may just help you re-write your CV.
*I very much regret bailing on the other seminar — it was taught by Amitav Ghosh, and the Ibis Trilogy later became my three favorite books. My friend took both seminars; I totally could have double-seminar-ed too. Sorry, Rachel! You were right!
**The summer after my grandparents took me to Acadia, they rented a house in Hyannis for week and what I'm learning from writing this post is that my grandmother spent my childhood picking out future field sites for me.
I’ve been reflecting on my own writing. Today, I picked up three bound booklets from my local copy shop. These are the ‘after’ picture of my PhD dissertation — the pdfs of the peer-reviewed papers that grew out of my ‘before’ dissertation chapters. The volume is sleeker than my official hardcover ProQuest dissertation copy, the figures are more refined, and the writing inside is much better.
I was so excited to share this news that I lost control of grammar and hit ‘send tweet’ with this: “Just picked up bound copies of my PhD’s final outputs for my and my mentors — the four peer-reviewed papers that came out of my dissertation chapters!” which I quickly followed with “**me and my mentors? Or myself and my mentors? I guess my typo split the difference?” My former labmate, Dr. Amanda Gallinat, shot back the brilliant response: “My mentos and their manatee*”
My dissertation was fine — I graduated! — but I am so proud of these papers and I appreciate how much work my mentors (my mentos) put into the polishing the writer (me, their manatee) in the years before and after I graduated. I am thinking in this framing — about my luck as a well-polished manatee — because I just read Stephen Heard’s blog post ‘Edit to polish the writing, or edit to polish the writer?’ Heard talks about the evolution of his feedback to early career writers, from full on track-changes to more restrained, but open-ended comments. He writes, “I now try to explain what writing problem I see and suggest fixes that the ECR might choose to pursue – that is, my intent is to edit to polish the writer, rather than to polish the writing.”
Last year I had the honor of serving as an advisor for a senior capstone project, supervising a student while she wrote the equivalent of a senior thesis. Her final paper was outstanding. Over the summer, we began revising that paper for submission to a conservation journal. Looking back, I recognize the tension I felt between polishing my student and polishing our paper. At the time, I didn’t have the framework to explain this feeling — Heard captures it with beautiful simplicity — but I remember the effort of reigning in my copyediting instincts. This student and I spent a few days together in July when I visited the research station where she was working on a field crew. I was fresh off of sending in proofs for my last dissertation chapter manuscript, and it seemed very important to step out of the mindset where I was the manatee, and shift into the role of being her mento on this paper. The adjustment was both imperceptible and enormous.*
My sleek, beautifully bound booklet of dissertation papers is less homogenous than my original dissertation. Without an introduction and conclusion, it’s still fairly cohesive — the first three papers are centered on Acadia National Park and clearly riff on each other’s datasets. But, there is a visible shift from paper to paper. The American Journal of Botany has columns, Rhodora does not; Ecosphere has a smaller font size than Northeastern Naturalist. When I place my booklet next to my dissertation, the inconsistencies in formatting are striking. Intriguingly, PLoS ONE just published ‘Scientific sinkhole: The pernicious price of formatting,’ a paper that quantifies the cost associated with formatting research papers for publication in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Allana LeBlanc and her coauthors surveyed research scientists on the time they invested in their manuscripts outside of analysis, writing, and editing — in other words, how long did they spend formatting the body of the manuscript, figures, tables, supplementary files, and references? LeBlanc concludes, “our results suggest that each manuscript costs 14 hours, or US$477 to format for publication in a peer reviewed journal. This represented a loss of 52 hours or a cost of US$1908 per person-year.”
While I agree that re-formatting a manuscript for a new journal is a pain (the researchers in LeBlanc’s survey reported that their manuscripts required a median of two attempts per accepted paper), I’m not sure that all 52 hours are a ‘sinkhole.’ The first 14 hours — the original formatting — won’t completely disappear even if journals adopt more open formatting standards. Maybe there will be less stress associated with meeting the approved journal abbreviations in your literature cited section or table dimensions, but you will still need to generate a literature cited section and you will still need to create the table. I’m not arguing that we keep arcane formatting rules — how is there not yet a common app of manuscript submissions?! — just that we acknowledge the non-writing hours that will always be required in manuscript preparation. Especially since, as we become the mentos, it’s likely our manatees will be the ones engaged in the frustrating work of formatting the manuscripts we helped them to polish.
And finally, I wanted to mention some lovely science writing advice for all the mentos and their manatees. In the Nature Career Column last week Van Savage and Pamela Yeh compiled the generous advice that they have received from a Pulitzer-prize winning writer. ‘Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper,’ is a powerhouse advice paper. I especially love: “Dashes should emphasize the clauses you consider most important — without using bold or italics — and not only for defining terms. (Parentheses can present clauses more quietly and gently than commas.) Don’t lean on semicolons as a crutch to join loosely linked ideas. This only encourages bad writing.” I’m a big fan of dashes — I love them more than I love absurd manatee riffs — and I'm working on my semicolon crutches.
McCarthy’s last tip is to “try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like.” I look at my booklet of PhD papers and I like these papers. The heart-swelling pride that I feel holding them all at once is part spite — I published new research about the impacts of climate change in a national park during the Trump Administration** — but also a recognition of personal and professional growth. These papers are the best version of my dissertation chapters. My mentos and their manatee did that — we took a decent dissertation and produced four really great peer-reviewed papers. It feels good.
*This code-switching between mentos and manatees could be, I think, one of Meghan Duffy's less obvious signs of reaching a new career stage. My whole post-doc has been this mash up of mentoring and being mentored that seems to shift from day to day. Britney Spears can relate.
**I explored the angst and intensity around publishing climate change research in 2018 last year. Writing about Castillo Vardaro's research on pikas in the Rocky Mountains, I said "we both finished our dissertation field work in National Parks before the 2016 election. Her work could inform whether pikas are listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act; my research supported a climate change vulnerability assessment; and after our halcyon days as PhD students under the Obama administration, we are now watching an administration and Secretary of the Interior generally disregard the National Park Service expertise on these issues. I told Castillo Vardaro that I feel an extra sense of urgency in publishing my Acadia papers now — especially in open access venues. I wondered if this was a personal quirk or if she felt a similar sense of responsibility for her field sites and study species."
References:
Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper. Nature Career Column. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02918-5
LeBlanc AG, Barnes JD, Saunders TJ, Tremblay MS, Chaput J-P (2019) Scientific sinkhole: The pernicious price of formatting. PLoS ONE 14(9): e0223116. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223116
Last Friday, PLOS CEO Alison Mudditt published a letter declaring that PLOS supports the Global Climate Strike on September 20, 2019. She wrote, “Their global call to action is meant to apply pressure on policymakers and drive change as world leaders gather on September 23rd at the United Nations Climate Action Summit. Thousands of scientists worldwide have signed letters endorsing the climate strikes, and we stand with them. We are giving all PLOS staff the opportunity to take the day and march to raise their voice for change.”
The Global Climate Strike is the latest outcome of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg’s call for school strikes. Her #FridaysforFuture movement encouraged children to strike, skip school, or organize protests to call attention to climate destruction. They write “why study for a future, which might not be there? Why spend a lot of effort to become educated, when our governments are not listening to the educated?”
Some in our broader community of academia have already offered public support for the school strikes; The Guardian published an open letter signed by 224 academics in February 2019. Friday’s Global Climate Strike asks all adults to stand in solidarity with the young activists and #FridaysforFuture movement. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) published An Adult’s Guide to the Climate Strike on their blog last week. Erika Spanger-Siegfried, a senior analyst in UCS Climate and Energy program, writes,
When I was around Greta’s age, climate change was already in the news and on my mind. But unlike today, we had time then to arrest the problem, bend the upward curve our emissions were on, and avert really dangerous changes and impacts. And unlike Greta and today’s young climate activists, I had great confidence that we would do it. Anything else would be insane, disastrous, unthinkable. But here we are, several decades later.
My experience echoes Spanger-Siegfried’s — I believed the adults would take care of things. I never thought that the future I was studying for would not be there, even as I started a PhD tracking the ecological effects of climate change on plant communities. This is, I think, a weird disconnect in retrospect. I am old enough to have grown up with climate optimism, but young enough to have never asked myself, When did you realize you work on climate change? because the answer was obvious.
PLOS and The Union of Concerned Scientists represent the growing assembly of adults standing with #ClimateStrike. PLOS CEO Alison Mudditt’s letter references PLOS-published climate change research — this publicly accessible repository of climate change knowledge stands as a symbol for how much we know about climate change. Our soapbox of research is needed on Friday. As ecologists, we can stand next to Greta and her generation. We invested a lot of effort to become educated and to fill PLOS with our research papers, now let’s spend the effort to be heard and to make space for the #ClimateStrike generation to join us in the field and in the lab in the future.
Find a Climate Strike near you.
Read more (&more!) climate change in the media from this week's global journalism initiative Covering Climate Now.
What is a drought? I know I don’t know — I live in the temperate northeastern United States and my field site is frequently wrapped in fog — but I get the feeling that I am not alone. According to a paper born from a Colorado State University graduate student seminar on ecology and drought, we should all be asking ourselves this question.
Drought seems to have lost its meaning for ecologists, and not in the semantic satiation way, where if you say a word over and over again it become aural nonsense. Ingrid J. Slette and her co-authors published ‘How ecologists define drought, and why we should do better’ in Global Change Biology this summer. As Slette tells it, “This project grew out of discussions during a grad student seminar course about ecology and drought. Everyone in the class approached drought from a different perspective, and when we looked to the literature to find a definition of drought that we could all agree on as a starting point for the class, we couldn't find one.” The class decided they needed to take a step back, and they shifted from synthesizing the impacts of drought to simply defining it. This might seem like a trivial point of semantics, but as they write in their paper, “Failure to define or characterize drought conditions in the published literature challenges out ability to advance ecological understanding.” You can’t compare studies, or compile a meta-analysis without understanding the idiosyncratic environmental conditions hidden under the catch-all term ‘drought.’
Perhaps we should not be surprised that ecologists can’t agree on drought; as I discovered while reading Slette’s paper, meteorologists and climatologists also struggle to define drought. But, the sticking point is not that we don’t have a clear definition of drought, it’s that ecologists use the term ‘drought’ in the literature as if we do. When Slette and her team surveyed 564 publications from the last fifty years of drought research, less than a third of the papers explicitly defined drought or cited a definition of drought. In addition, they report: “ecologists most often use the term drought as a synonym for generally dry conditions (~30% of papers). In other words, authors state they are studying drought without quantifying and/or contextualizing how dry conditions are relative to normal (e.g., by reporting stardardized index values, or some measure of deviation from average conditions).”
But wait, it gets even juicer — it turns out that hand-waving about drought may be distracting ecologists from noticing the actual climatic conditions at their study sites.Slette and her coauthors selected a subset of studies from their review that were (a) bad at defining drought, but (b) good at providing details about their geographic location. They pulled the location coordinates and timeframes of these studies to calculate Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) values using the Global SPEI database. Only half of the droughts in this subset were characterized by especially dry SPEI values, outside the range of normal climate variability for their ecosystem. They found that 87% of the drought studies took place during times that were drier than average for the study site, but 13% of these “drought” studies were from periods that were slightly wetter than average based on estimated SPEI values. And while there may have been extremely local conditions that were truly dry at some of these "wet-droughts", we don't know because the authors did not report on them or place them within the context of the local long-term climate records.
I asked Slette about the review process for this paper. I had seen on twitter that it was her first publication as a lead author, and I wondered if journal editors had recognized the importance of this topic. I assumed that Slette may have faced the same challenges as authors of ‘advice papers’ who struggled to find the right home for their work. Both this paper and Dyson et al’s advice for urban ecologists working on private property had origin stories in graduate students creating the resources that they were searching for early in their careers. Slette and her seminar wanted a straightforward ecological definition on drought and couldn’t find it. Slette wrote, “I anticipated that it would be quite difficult to get this paper published, but I was actually pleasantly surprised by how well the editors and reviewers received it. Choosing to submit this paper as an Opinion was an important decision in terms of finding a good home for it, I think that turned out to be a better fit for it than as a primary research article.” Then, I asked her about her own research, aside from writing sharp reviews of ecological literature. I wanted to know what definition of drought she used and how it had changed since writing her definition paper. Slette is a PhD candidate at CSU, and she answered, “I study how changing precipitation amounts and variability affect plant production. Specifically, I have been studying how experimentally-imposed extreme droughts affect plant root production and aboveground vs. belowground resource allocation in Central U.S. grasslands. For these experiments, drought was defined as a reduction in precipitation similar to what this area experienced during the Dust Bowl, about a 2/3 reduction from average. After writing this review paper, I am much more cognizant of all drought definitions, including my own. In every paper that I write from now on, I am definitely going to include more detail about the conditions of the drought itself, not just about its impacts.”
Finally, I asked her if the process of mining hundreds of papers for definitions of drought has made her a tougher reviewer or raised her standards for precise language from other ecologists. “I will definitely become a tougher reviewer now! I'm going to evaluate for precise wording and ask for lots of information about study design and justification.” I think that anyone who reads Slette’s paper will walk away with similar raised standards. And those of use who work in wet ecosystems should think about this too — we need to evaluate how we define our own work and what assumptions are hidden in our terms and jargon. As Slette notes, “I hope that the positive feedback and acceptance of this paper signals increased interest in (re)evaluating how ecologists define their work.”
References:
Slette, I.J., Post, A.K., Awad, M., Even, T., Punzalan, A., Williams, S., Smith, M.D. and Knapp, A.K., 2019. How ecologists define drought, and why we should do better. Global Change Biology. 25(10), pp.3193-3200.
Grab your reusable coffee mugs and your best pair of Chacos; pack your vintage tote bag and your most ecologically-on-point knitting project. The Ecological Society of America meeting is next week!
ESA is an overwhelming, exhausting, inspiring, coffee-fueled rush; your closest colleagues, mentors, and friends are all in one city, and yet you can’t find anyone who is free for lunch on the same day.
I’ve had extraordinary luck stumbling — literally wandering the hallways — into wonderful people and incredible talks at ESA over the years. As a newly-minted master’s student at ESA 2010, I found a mentor who became my academic sibling* and suggested I consider pursuing research in Acadia National Park (spoiler alert: I still work in Acadia, it’s become my research home). I serendipitously saw Robin Wall Kimmerer in an organized oral session** at ESA 2012; two years later she published the instant conservation classic Braiding Sweetgrass. (This year, you should catch Kimmerer’s Recent Advances plenary).
I began writing for the PLoS Ecology Community as an ESA Reporting Fellow in 2016, and I wanted to mark the occasion of ESA this year with another kind of report. While my schedule is too packed for pure wandering this year, I love the feeling of finding those hidden gems when the sprawling community of ecologists comes together like this — a talk in another subdiscipline, a potential collaborator, a nugget of advice that you didn’t realize you really needed. So, I did my wandering ahead of time; I paused my #365papers reading last week to pore over the ESA 2019 Program. Here, I compiled a top twelve list of highly anticipated Contributed Talks. The talks are wide-ranging, covering topics in marine, terrestrial, temperate, and tropical ecology, spanning forests and grasslands, arthropods and humans, but ultimately the list reflects my personal preferences. As I write in my coverletter, “I’m a broadly trained ecologist.” I chose these talks because they are a little bit out of my wheelhouse, but — to stretch this baseball metaphor to the limit — I can hold my own, foul off a few balls, and raise the pitch count before popping an infield fly. This is a terrible metaphor; science is not baseball. If ESA is a buffet of endless dishes, I love to pile my plate with a bite of everything. So while I think these talks all sound fascinating, your mileage may vary.
The criteria for this list were: 1) I couldn’t know the authors. This had to be the analog of wandering into a room because the title posted outside sounded interesting. 2) Contributed talks only, no Organized Oral Sessions, Symposia, or Inspire talks. Inspire talks are my favorite format as an audience member but when I attend them I intentionally choose an Inspire Session, arrive early for a good seat, and stay. Usually I follow the same pattern with Organized Oral Sessions and Symposia. 3) Ignore the rules of time. Some of my top 12 are scheduled concurrently; I’m going to channel Hermione Granger circa Prisoner of Azkaban and invest in a time-turner.
In order of appearance, the Top 12 Highly Anticipated Contributed Talks at ESA 2019:
Marine soundscapes indicate kelp forest condition (COS7-1), presented by Benjamin L. Gottesman. Monday, August 12, 2019 01:30 PM - 01:50 PM Kentucky International Convention Center - L011/012
Soil health, agriculture and climate in New England: Scientific findings, farming practices and policies (COS1-8), presented by Josephine Watson. Monday, August 12, 2019 04:00 PM - 04:20 PM Kentucky International Convention Center - M101/102
No lake left behind: Do protected areas facilitate biological connectivity among lakes? (COS14-1), presented by Ian M. McCullough. Tuesday, August 13, 2019 08:00 AM - 08:20 AM Kentucky International Convention Center - M101/102
A survey on the interpretation and application of the terms 'trait' and 'functional trait' among ecologists (COS18-6), presented by Alexander Duthie. Tuesday, August 13, 2019 09:50 AM - 10:10 AM Kentucky International Convention Center - M111
If you plant it, they won't come immediately (COS25-8), presented by Natalie R. Harris. Tuesday, August 13, 2019 10:30 AM - 10:50 AM Kentucky International Convention Center - L015/019 (side note: I really hope Natalie Harris and the authors of COS49-8, “If we build it, will they come? Arthropod communities as indicators of restoration in an urban prairie network” get a chance to talk to each other in Louisville)
Do you have a better idea? Conceptual framework of programs focusing on multiple species conservation (COS21-8), presented by William Stewart. Tuesday, August 13, 2019 10:30 AM - 10:50 AM Kentucky International Convention Center - L013
Bringing the ecology back: Transformation of a landscape from a one hundred year old golf course into a nature preserve (COS39-5), presented by Suzanne R Hoehne. Tuesday, August 13, 2019 02:50 PM - 03:10 PM Kentucky International Convention Center - L015/019
Gender-responsive labor policy in protected areas: Lessons from boosting women’s roles in the management of the World Heritage Site Serra da Capivara National Park, Brazil (COS35-5), presented by Diele Lobo. Tuesday, August 13, 2019 02:50 PM - 03:10 PM Kentucky International Convention Center - M101/102
Things that go bump in the light: Introduction of artificial light at night increases abundance of predators, detritivores, and parasites in arthropod communities (COS42-2), presented by Jeffrey A Brown. Wednesday, August 14, 2019 08:20 AM - 08:40 AM Kentucky International Convention Center - L010/014
Phenology as a process rather than an event (COS68-7), presented by Brian D. Inouye. Wednesday, August 14, 2019 03:40 PM - 04:00 PM Kentucky International Convention Center - L010/014
A pulse of petals: Impacts of coffee (Coffea arabica) flower petals on leaf litter community and leaf litter decomposition rates (COS57-7), presented by Lauren Schmitt. Wednesday, August 14, 2019 04:00 PM - 04:20 PM Kentucky International Convention Center - M111
Using circuit theory to map connectivity of the U.S. Great Lakes coastline (COS98-3), presented by Lindsay E. F. Hunt. Friday, August 16, 2019 08:40 AM - 09:00 AM Kentucky International Convention Center - L007/008
Some observations from the experience of reading through contributed talk titles: We, as ecologists, can be kind of boring and vague in our talk titles. We like Hamlet (“to ___ or not to ____”), Game of Thrones (“winter is coming”), and hot takes on whether or not to befriend the enemy of our enemies. I have to tip my hat to Jamie Harrison (current Templer student), Pam Templer (my former committee member), and Andrew Reinmann (fomer Templer student): they basically created their own organized oral session in COS30 by submitting three nearly-identical talk titles: “Effects of climate change across seasons on ______ in a northern hardwood forest.” I imagine sitting in this session will be like watching a lab synchronized swimming routine (since it’s the Templer lab, would it be a synchronized snow shoveling routine?).
Finally, the ESA 2019 program is overflowing with talks that sound amazing and this list is by no means exhaustive. After my first pass through the program, I had 67 talks starred***! This conference promises to be another overwhelming, exhausting, inspiring, coffee-fueled rush of amazing ideas and stand out speakers. Hope to see you there!
*Academic sibling = I joined the lab where he completed his PhD
**This was before I instituted my personal pick-a-session-and-stay-in-that-room rule for Organized Oral Sessions. I remember on that particular day, I was feeling a little burnt out from long phenology sessions and so I just started aimlessly walking around the conference center and I literally stumbled into the room right as Kimmerer began speaking.
***And that's just total strangers! How am I going to see my friends? Where do I get a time turner?
“In science, I concluded, even in fields as apparently apolitical as ichthyology and glaciology, the story always involves more than a fish in a tin pan or lines etched on bedrock. Culture, history, and beliefs about humans determine, now as in the nineteenth century, who exactly is invited into the science laboratory to “look and look again” at the fish in the pan, and who exactly has the leisure and means to take a trip to Maine.”— Marion K. McInnes, “Looking for Louis Agassiz: A Story of Rocks and Race in Maine”
Less than a week after I published a blog post that referenced Louis Agassiz and the Look-at-Your-Fish-school-of-natural-history-instruction, I stumbled upon an essay that upended my perception of Agassiz, glaciers, and the apocryphal fish. “Looking for Louis Agassiz: A Story of Rocks and Race in Maine” flashed on my radar via my google scholar alert for Acadia National Park and Dr. Marion McInnes pulled me down a history of science rabbit hole to face my own field site and writing in an unforgiving mirror.
McInnes weaves together the geologic history of Mount Desert Island, Maine, Agassiz’s well-founded theories on glaciers, and his illegitimate theories on race in an astounding piece that’s part archival detective story, part cultural criticism. This essay is engaging and thought-provoking and scathing. I did not escape unscathed. Because, here’s the thing: I elided Agassiz’s racism when I quoted Look at Your Fish. I knew better — I read Chrisoph Irmscher’s 2013 biography Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science and half-remembered Agassiz’s spurious writing on superior and inferior races even as I was typing up pithy takes on his pedagogical style.
Both McInnes’ essay and Irmscher’s Agassiz biography cover the breadth of Agassiz’s career as a scientist and teacher. In the mid-19th century, Agassiz leveraged his position as a public intellectual to expound on race: his writing and lectures added scientific credence to the idea of the white superiority. He was an abolitionist and a champion of glaciers over the biblical Noah’s flood as a geologic force. He also rejected Darwin and believed in a theory of multiple creations, which included separate creations for different human races, the “newest” and best model being white Europeans like himself. My personal brand is loving 19th century naturalists, and my historical ecology research makes it clear that all my favs are problematic. This essay reinforces the important point that glossing over these problems, especially if they were cultural norms, is itself problematic.
McInnes’ essay centers on her quest to find the Agassiz Outcrop, a site that, at the outset, she believes is a National Historic Landmark in Maine celebrating an outcrop of 510 million-year-old Ellsworth Schist bedrock bearing glacial striations and Agassiz’s name. Except she discovers that the Agassiz Outcrop is unmarked, half-hidden beside a parking lot, and its status has actually been inflated by a mistake on Maine.gov — it’s on the National Register of Historic Places, added in 2003, but it is not a capital ‘L’ Landmark. Ellsworth is on the mainland side of the bridge to Mount Desert Island; it’s where I do my grocery shopping on my way to my field housing each spring and boasts the Home Depot where I’ve spent thousands of dollars of grant money on corner gutter pieces, zip ties, cloth weed barrier, and various other field ecology supplies.
As I read McInnes’ essay, I could picture most of the geological formations she references — the pink granite, the glacial erratics — but I had never heard of the Agassiz Outcrop. Then, I saw her photo and I immediately recognized the parking lot.
I’m a pretty curious person with a stubborn streak in research projects, but I’m not sure I would have followed the threads that McInnes plucks from here; I think I might have let the project die in that parking lot of underwhelming landmark status and disappointment. I am genuinely amazed by what McInnes has crafted from the ashes* of the Agassiz Outcrop anecdote, and her dedication to unwinding the story of Agassiz, this outcrop, and the cultural moments they connect. As she writes in her introduction, “when I started this project I thought I was taking a trip back to the Palaeozoic and pre-Cambrian Eras, but in fact I landed squarely in the nineteenth century.”
Among my favorite moments in this essay is when McInnes reads Agassiz’s ‘Glacial Phenoma of Maine’ from a bound copy of the year-end edition of Atlantic Monthly in her college library: “When I took down volume XIX to look for Agassiz’s articles on Maine, the leather spine tore along the seam; red dust coated my fingers and stained my clothes. All the better: this was the volume published in 1867, here in my hands, and not on a sterile computer screen.” A more recent paper on Maine glaciology looms large too: Smith and Borns’ “Louis Agassiz, the Great Deluge, and Early Maine Geology” published in Northeastern Naturalist nineteen years ago. Smith and Borns turn out to be the catalyst behind the Agassiz Outcrop’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places; it was their recommendation that landed the site this honor. But McInnes is more interested in what Smith and Borns’ left out of their writing on Agassiz: race.
“In their article for Northeastern Naturalist in 2000, Smith and Borns sidestep the issue of Agassiz’s racism; they simply do not refer to his views on race at all. One might argue that they wrote this piece, after all, for an audience interested in geology, not social history…Yet this reasoning does not suffice. In the last section of their article, Smith and Borns consider Agassiz’s legacy outside of his contributions to glacial theory; they highlight his contributions to science education, his skill as a mentor of future brilliant scientists, and his support of women…I can understand their quandary as writers, and I continue to appreciate the research Smith and Borns have done on nineteenth-century geologists, including Agassiz, who studied bedrock in Maine. But if Agassiz’s enlightened views of women are relevant to the case they make for his being ‘one of the world’s preeminent natural historians,’ then so are his views on race.”
Here, McInnes cuts through a thousand thorny arguments with incredible clarity. Why did I feel so guilty reading this after publishing a blog post that conveniently forgot to mention Agassiz’s racism? I think McInnes nails this sin of omission. In her writing on stripping memorials of problematic namesakes she plucks a perfect metaphor from the google map view of the road that passes by the Agassiz Outcrop: a ‘FILL WANTED’ sign. “This alternative, it seems to me, calls for research and interpretive work rather than erasure of the past. We want and need the full story of science history: we need to fill in what has been left out of geology textbook chapters on Agassiz’s Ice Age Theory; and “FILL” could usefully be added to the signage in the galleries of what once was the Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology.”
I cannot recommend this essay enough. When I teach Field Natural History, I will assign it in tandem with Look At Your Fish; the two pieces are now inseparable in my mind.
It is amazing how this improbable connection came together: an essay written by a Professor Emerita of English at DePauw University, published in the latest issue of Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal that I’d never heard of before. This is, by all accounts, a paper I should never have read. But, the practice of reading a paper a day can be expansive and magical; it can allow for opportunities to read broadly and cast a wide net, or an interdisciplinary Acadia-sized-net. For these reasons, I’m just sort of charmed that my off-again on-again dedication to #365papers became a conduit for the universe to reach out and smack me for letting Agassiz’s racism slide unchecked in the year of our goddess 2019. I will do better.
*terrible wordplay here — Ellsworth Schist is not igneous rock.
Reference:
McInnes, Marion K. 2019. Looking for Louis Agassiz: A Story of Rocks and Race in Maine. Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. 52(2): 35-56.
This post is a short attempt to peel back the curtain on my “bad at pollen” process.
Since my very first pollen clinic in the BEAST Lab at University of Maine I’ve been instructed to sketch the pollen as I see it on reference slides and create my own kind of visual library. This approach makes sense — I remember drawing carex perigynia and fern pinnae in my first field botany course, filling my Rite-in-the-Rain notebook with pages of half-erased sepals and efforts to capture anther angles.
I’m not a practicing sketch-book type of scientist — my field books from my PhD research are mostly long tables dotted with squashed mosquitos and lists of taxa — but I don’t vehemently claim that “I just can't draw”. When I was a master’s student, I took at print-making class at Burlington City Arts and got off campus and out of my head for a couple hours each week. I couldn’t completely stop thinking about my research, but I could redirect that energy towards creating screen prints of my study species. I poured over my photographs from my field season and sketched each of the six flowers over and over again.After I graduated, and moved to Chicago, I took a class at the Lillstreet Art Center and did it again — creating a new alpine plant screen from a new series of sketches of the same six species.
But, I knew those plants (even if, as it turns out, our volunteers maybe didn’t know them?), and drawing familiar flowers repeatedly is perhaps a different game from sketching pollen grains and lining the margins with notes like “cute tennis ball” (Fraxinus) and “I think this is a margo” (Acer).
A recent paper in Journal of Biological Education reinforces the idea that drawing plants — or in my case, pollen — can help us develop botanical knowledge. The paper, “A comparison of descriptive writing and drawing of plants for the development of adult novices’ botanical knowledge,” presents a case study that supports the sketch-to-learn model, or at least the sketch-to-better-capture-the-details-in-your-notes model. Drs. Bethan C. Stagg and Michael F. Verde led half-day wildflower events where students filled notebooks with either descriptive writing or labelled drawing for a suite of plants. Later, the students were given an identification test (labeling plants from the learning activities with their common name or noting ‘look-alike’ for trick question species that were not a part of the learning activities) and a morphology test (true/false questions about diagnostic characters of the study species).
These were all self-described novice botanists — “the event announcement stated that participants should not be able to identify more than twenty common native plants.” The writers and drawers scored equally well on the tests, but Stagg and Verde found that the sketches captured more recognizable diagnostic characters for each species than the written descriptions.
“Drawing in biology develops students’ observational skills by engaging the learner in close, detailed study of the focal organism,” Stagg and Verde write in the Introduction. They reel off a list of citations, but this connection between drawing and observing in biology has a long tradition in natural history training. In the classic essay “Look at Your Fish,” a prospective entomology student joins Louis Agassiz’s lab in the 19th century and is given a jarred haemulon fish specimen and instructed to study it.
Slowly I drew forth that hideous fish, and with a feeling of desperation again looked at it. I might not use a magnifying glass; instruments of all kinds were interdicted. My two hands, my two eyes, and the fish: it seemed a most limited field. I pushed my finger down its throat to feel how sharp the teeth were. I began to count the scales in the different rows until I was convinced that that was nonsense. At last a happy thought struck me—I would draw the fish, and now with surprise, I began to discover new features in the creature. Just then the professor returned."That is right," said he; "a pencil is one of the best of eyes."
Ultimately the student spends three days observing this fish and sporadically fielding questions from Professor Agassiz in what sounds like one of the most stressful and bewildering orientation exercises. Agassiz is never satisfied and leaves every interaction cryptically instructing him to “look at your fish” before disappearing for an unspecified period of time.
The pedagogical style is outdated, kind of. While none of my PIs pulled a straight Agassiz on me, the essay has been assigned as a reading in natural history courses twice in my career.
My fish is a box of pollen slides. But my fish is also a stack of literature, palynology and conservation paleobiology papers in a field where I am very much still sketching the outlines and learning the vocabulary. Is it possible to bring that pencil-is-one-of-the-best-of-eyes attention to detail to reading indoors instead of botanizing outdoors or pollen-counting under a microscope?
She tweeted, “I'm going to do quick TLDRs for the articles I read~!” and posted a handwritten summary of the 2003 paper Keeping the Academics in Service Learning Projects, or Teaching Environmental History to Tree Planters with an illustration of a student sitting by a freshly-planted seedling asking “What did I just do + what does it mean?” Liz usually creates artwork that centers the prairie plants she studies, but here, she's sharing digital sketches of the academic literature. She beautifully distills the papers into these concise take-away nuggets framed by her simple, striking art. Each TLDR page is inviting and memorable —and the process creates so much more meaning than my haphazardly highlighted pdf pages and marginalia from my folder of #365papers.
I love exploring prairie ecosystems through Kozik’s eyes, but now I can’t wait to see more of her TLDR and follow her reading! To circle back, I’ve been trying to apply Stagg and Verde’s advice to my pollen sketches — “Participants were encouraged to be undeterred by drawing ability or botanical knowledge and were advised to create their own terms for unknown morphological features.” I’m not quite at the level of sketching paleoecology papers, but my “light freckles, three-cornered popcorn kernel” is slowly becoming “surface psilate, exine indistinctly tectate, sub-triangular to spherical, pores aspidate.”
Reference:
Stagg, B. C., & Verde, M. F. (2018). A comparison of descriptive writing and drawing of plants for the development of adult novices’ botanical knowledge. Journal of Biological Education, 28(2), 1–16. http://doi.org/10.1080/00219266.2017.1420683
I’m in the middle — the frustrating, slow, and muddy middle — of learning how to be bad at science. How to be bad at one very specific part of a subdiscipline of a scientific field that I love, in theory, but currently suck at. On my CV I’ve worked very hard to present myself as someone who is good at science. I am, academically, good on paper: I’ve got the advanced degrees to prove it. I’ve been a “fellow” more than once. And while I wasn’t born, Athena-style, a fully-formed botanist, I don’t remember the beginning, the part of my education where I learned how to be bad at plants.
I think my plant ecology skills were honed so slowly — from gardening with my mom as a kid, hiking at summer camp, working in outdoor education in college — that I became good at plants imperceptibly, and by the time I took a field botany course in grad school, the taxonomy and morphology were at least familiar, if not already labeled correctly, in my mental map.
I grounded my PhD research in field sites that supported the same plant communities I studied as a master’s student. When I began, I bought a new field guide, but I honestly could have just carried the old dichotomous keys across state lines. And then I decided to become a paleoecologist.
There are 99 glass slides of pollen in a box that represent my postdoc work. They cover 408 cm of sediment from the bottom of a pond in Acadia National Park. As a PhD student, I spent four years monitoring the plants on the ridge above this pond — I know every stem that grows there now; the slides should tell me what used to grow there, the pollen like a fingerprint of past vegetation communities. If you gave me the lace of veins left behind from a decomposing leaf on that ridge, if you handed me an empty fruit stalk, I could identify the plant to species, almost carelessly. But when I look at my slides, I feel like I am drowning in unknowns.
Under the microscope, my plants become anonymous. Pollen, it turns out, is not intrinsically identifiable. When I look at a birch tree, for example, I don’t need to think about how to parse it, the identification is reflexive. When I look at birch pollen, I see shapes, kind of rounded-triangles or triangular-balls, with nubbins at the corners, and nothing about it screams birch. Not yet.
I am 35, and I am a beginner, learning plants again and for the first time. I say for the first time because last time around, I was not cognizant of the learning process. I didn’t know I was ever bad at plants. But I am definitely bad at pollen.
Pollen is humbling me. I’m learning how to tell tricolpate grains from tricolporate grains, making Pinus v Picea lists to remember which one has an indistinct transition zone between its rugulate bladders and stippled body, and assigning the keys on my keyboard in the program PolyCounter, so that when I tap ‘k’ it counts one Fagus. But, I’m also learning how to inhabit this research: when is my best time to count pollen, how do I increase my daily hours at the microscope without burning out, and when I see improvement in how quickly I count a slide, how do I know if I’m getting better at pollen, or just getting sloppy. I’m still so bad at pollen, that I don’t know the difference between feeling genuinely stuck on a hard identification or just seeing a common grain from an uncommon angle. It’s hard to see a way out.
I’ve been bad at pollen for a couple months now. I was so afraid of being bad, so stuck in this feeling, that I stalled in the learning phase. I stuck to my box of reference slides — each one a simple collection of a single pollen type, labelled with the genus or species it holds — and tentatively shuffled through. When I would peek at a real slide, a slide from my project, the chaos of unknowns would overwhelm me. I dragged my feet; I didn’t feel qualified to start counting. I knew that I would, someday, probably be good at pollen because at some point in the future the 99 slides would be identified and counted, I just didn’t feel connected to that process.
I still haven’t gracefully learned how to be bad at science. But, I have started collecting advice, and noticing my stumbling blocks, and I think that eventually these reflections will help me empathize with students in a way that I couldn’t before because I didn’t know what it felt like to be bad at plants.
I love the Tall Heights song, Learn Again. Full disclosure: I knew those guys in high school, and so I might have been there in the study halls in the song. However, high school me was probably dutifully doing her homework, and generally learning how to be good at academic things and would not have identified with the lyrics on this level. Postdoc me is all about learning again. Occasionally I rewrite the lyrics and sing them to my pollen. “Sometimes I forget to do, the things that paleoecologists do…”
The most meaningful advice I’ve found about being bad at something you love is from Ira Glass. I didn’t go to high school with Ira Glass and so this is slightly less personal, and on top of that he is speaking to creatives, and not necessarily scientists, but this resonates. This American Life superfans can listen to this recording of Ira's advice; it's slightly different from the quote as transcribed on GoodReads (below):
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
My pollen is my story here. And I just need to start counting pollen. And if I have to come back and recount the first five or ten slides, the first twenty slides, I will do that. I will fight my way through. I will learn again how to be bad, so that I can eventually become not a static good, but a growing better.
There is something magical about reading a well-written, remarkable paper from outside of your sub-discipline — the echoes of familiarity in methodology, the unpredictable overlaps, the serendipity of finding the research in the first place.
I recently found this magic in Vertical foraging shifts in Hawaiian forest birds in response to invasive rat removal, published in PLoS ONE in September 2018. Co-first-authors Dr. Erin E. Wilson Rankin and Dr. Jessie L. Knowlton transported me to the northeast slope of Mauna Loa Volcano for a bird-watching and bug-counting adventure through a network of half rat-eradicated kīpuka — a jigsaw puzzle of fragmented forest pieces dissected by lava flows.
By most measures, I should never have read this paper. It came out while I was staggering though the first weeks of parental leave last fall. My invasive species are plants (not rats); there’s really no vertical space available (the trees are too short!) for shifts in arthropods or their predators in my plant communities at treeline; my island study site (downeast Maine) hasn’t seen volcanic activity for hundreds of millions of years (Hawaii’s kīpuka are created when volcanic lava flows move through native forests). For reasons I can’t explain, earlier this month I clicked on a link to The Wildlife Society’s — a society I’m not a part of and don’t actually follow on social media — Wildlife Publication Awards 2019 shortlist announcement. At the end of the Journal Paper category, this Hawaii study caught my eye, because I’m planning a trip there in the fall and recently spent three early morning hours driving through Iowa and Minnesota with my friend who is a postdoc at the University of Hawaii, Hilo.
Despite the winding the path to get this paper into my To Read Folder, there was a straight line from my final scroll through the Conclusions to the “compose” button on my email. I had to hear more from Drs. Wilson Rankin and Knowlton.
Here is what my initial google searches turned up: stunning photographs of kīpuka; and the discovery that the two first authors, now faculty at UC Riverside and Wheaton College, were postdocs on this project who first came to the kīpuka from the subfields of entomology (Dr. Wilson Rankin) and ornithology (Dr. Knowlton) back in 2011. The invasive rat removal efforts in their paper was a part of a larger study: 16 kīpuka fragments were methodically outfitted with trapping grids and compared to another 18 kīpuka without rat traps. “The larger study has examined how impacts by invasive predators (rats) change across a gradient of ecosystem size,” Wilson Rankin and Knowlton explained to me. “The kīpuka are a patchwork of forest fragments that were created when volcanic lava flows moved through native forests. The result is a landscape dotted with naturally fragmented forest patches that range in size from very small (<0.1 ha) to very large (>12 ha). This study system allowed us to tease apart the effects of invasive rats and the effects of ecosystem (or forest patch size) in order to better understand the forces that shape communities.”
I asked how an entomologist and an ornithologist from different universities on the US mainland ended up working together in Hawaii. “The kīpuka project was a highly collaborative project among PIs at Stanford University, University of Maryland, Michigan Tech, and the US Forest Service that integrated multiple research fields to examine the effects of an invader on native communities.” They confirmed what google had hinted about their origin story. “We both joined this project early on as post-docs, one focusing on quantifying invasion impacts on the arthropod communities and the other focusing on the responses of native forest birds. By bringing together a research team with diverse backgrounds and expertise, the kīpuka project was able to develop a broad and in-depth understanding of how rats shape the invaded communities and alter the interactions among native species.” They ultimately found that the presence of invasive rats altered the foraging behavior of native birds — in rat-filled fragments the birds foraged higher in the canopy. The rats are not found above 6 m in the forest, but they seem to control the arthropod biomass below 6 m, suppressing the resources available for birds, especially insectivores and frugivores. In sites without rats, there was more arthropod biomass below 6 m and birds foraged at lower mean heights compared to higher foraging heights in control kīpuka.
These kīpuka are like the matryoshka dolls of island biogeography, a model system in a model system. The forest fragments are islands of habitat, and these in turn are contained within the island of Hawai‘i. I asked Wilson Rankin and Knowlton what they hoped managers in other systems could learn from this work. They write, “The fact that the kīpuka are fragments of habitat within a less hospitable matrix makes them comparable to other fragmented systems, which, as we all know, are increasingly common as human development continues to expand through natural habitats.” The kīpuka islands within islands system is special, but can still contribute to our understanding about invasive species in general. “While Hawaii is unique because of its high number of endemic species and long isolation from mammalian predators, many fragmented habitats are having to contend with extinctions of native species and invasions of nonnative species, even on the mainland. Our work shows that these invaders can alter whole trophic systems, either directly or via shifts in species’ behavior. This work helps to highlight the importance of considering the synergistic and sometimes unpredictable effects that habitat fragmentation and invasive species together can have on native food webs. We hope that both factors will be taken into account when planning restoration or conservation actions.”
Finally, I just loved the opportunity to write about two women in STEM and their postdoc work. And I told Wilson Rankin and Knowlton that I appreciated reading a new paper covering fieldwork that concluded six years ago. My own dissertation researchfrom 2011-2013ish just reaching publication now too. As they write, “Patience and persistence are the two key words when it comes to getting your research published.” Wilson Rankin and Knowlton shared this reflection on the triumphs and low points of the journey from fieldwork to award-winning publication: “We both came onto this project as postdocs, and supervised the data collection for the three years of field research. After that we both went on to other positions, and thus had to balance writing up manuscripts from this research with the demands of new positions. Once submitted, this manuscript went through the revision process, which took some time but we are all pleased with the end product. In general, our advice to others would be to not be discouraged during the review process or its pace, as you can always improve a manuscript and the reviews are meant to help you improve your work.”
Somehow, this magical paper also brought some timely advice into my email inbox as I head into a summer of writing up first drafts of my own postdoc papers. I welcome this nice reminder to keep grinding, and to keep working with some of my fabulous peer-collaborators as they embark on new adventures and new jobs in the coming years. And of course, I am now more excited than ever to spend some time in Hawaii with conservation researchers this fall!
Reference:
Wilson Rankin EE, Knowlton JL, Gruner DS, Flaspohler DJ, Giardina CP, Leopold DR, et al. (2018) Vertical foraging shifts in Hawaiian forest birds in response to invasive rat removal. PLoS ONE 13(9): e0202869. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202869
In 1953, ichthyologist Kay Lawrence joined a research expedition searching for fossils in the Amazon Basin. This was the same year that Rosalind Franklin left King’s College in London, after she created the X-ray diffraction image of DNA that was shown to Watson and Crick without her approval or knowledge. Lawrence was the only woman in a team of five scientists, and the only one without a PhD, or at least the only one who was not referred to as “Dr.” in the publicity materials for the expedition. Her fieldwork hit some snags — not the least of which was a foreboding black lagoon and an amphibious monster that fell in love with her and her extremely scientific white bathing suit.
Yes — Kay is actress Julia Adams and the amphibious monster is the Creature from the Black Lagoon. But there’s also a Rosalind Franklin figure in Creature from the Black Lagoon, and like Franklin, her contributions were obscured, overshadowed, and openly questioned for decades. Mallory O’Meara brings the story of Milicent Patrick, the makeup artist and special effects designer behind the Creature, to life in a fun and funny new biography, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick.
O’Meara grew up loving horror films and she was over the moon when she learned that her favorite movie monster, the Creature, was designed by a woman named Milicent Patrick. The world of horror is dominated by men, and so even though O’Meara only knew the barest details, she clung to Patrick as a patron saint of representation. In her introduction, O’Meara writes:
“Milicent was holding a door open for me that I never realized I had considered closed. Come on, she said. We belong here, too. I accepted her invitation. I make monster movies for a living. I produce them, I write them. Over the years, I searched for information, for anything that could tell me more about her. For all of my adult life and film career, Milicent Patrick has been a guiding light, a silent friend, a beacon reminding me that I belonged.”
O’Meara’s book is wonderful and engaging. She pieces together the lost legacy of her horror icon and takes the reader along on the research journey. I listened to the audiobook and fell in love with O’Meara’s voice which is somehow both welcoming and acerbic, irreverent and admiring. And, from the beginning, I was struck by how well the world of science mapped onto The Lady from the Black Lagoon’s world of science fiction. The story of why Milicent Patrick’s legacy was lost turns out to be completely banal, standard issue sexism and O’Meara deftly places this history in the context of the #MeToo movement.
“So many women share this experience, women in every profession. We’re ignored, sexually harassed, talked down to, plagiarized and insulted in and out of the workplace. It’s worse if you’re a woman of color, a queer woman, a disable woman, a transwoman and worse still if you’re a combination of any of these. I don’t know a single woman working in my field, or any creative field, or any field at all, who cannot relate to Milicent Patrick. It’s not just her story. It’s mine, too.”
I love O’Meara's description of Patrick’s process during the design of the Creature: “for inspiration, Milicent researched prehistoric animals: reptiles, amphibians, fish. She specifically looked for illustrations of animals from the Devonian period, which is when the Creature claw fossil in the film is from. The Devonian period, about four hundred million years ago, was the time period when life began to adapt to dry land from the sea. She spent weeks sketching out designs.” I had no idea The Creature from the Black Lagoon built a myth from this core kernel of scientific truth. Aside from this deep dive into a specific monster origin story, O’Meara’s book is not a science story*. But, I spent much of the book’s treatment of women in the film industry thinking about women in STEM.
When O’Meara compares Patrick’s Hollywood to her own experiences in film in the 21st century, the resemblance of these narratives to the past and present in STEM fields is eerie. O’Meara began her project because the idea of Milicent Patrick — a woman working behind the scenes in horror films — embodied such an important possibility to her in a field where otherwise she did not see herself represented. But, as she uncovered uncomfortable truths about Patrick as a person, she had to grapple with how to portray an imperfect personal hero. “The problem with being the only woman to ever do something is that you have to be perfect,” she laments. “When I found out about her as a teenager, I thought that for Milicent to be the first and only woman to ever design a famous monster, to be one of the first female animators, she had to be superhuman. She had to have been better than any other woman who ever wanted to design a monster. She had to have been the only one worthy enough to enter that boys’ club. This way of thinking is a mal-adaptation women have developed over the years to be able to deal with the fact that we’re getting passed on for jobs because we’re female. You force yourself to believe that there just haven’t been any women good enough for the job, rather than accept the fact that the entire system just doesn’t want you in it.” This is the hip, feminist-forward biographer’s way of saying that the water is not responsible for fixing the leaky pipeline.
I have my own Milicent Patrick, only her name is Annie Sawyer Downs. She left behind just enough of a scientific legacy that I’m awed by her botanical prowess and totally frustrated by the blanks in her life story. Like O’Meara, I’ve considered this woman to be “a guiding light, a silent friend, a beacon reminding me that I belonged.” O’Meara opens her book with the story of her Milicent Patrick tattoo — and, even before you read Chapter 1, you see the beautiful cover art for the book, which was created by her tattoo artist. On the Literary Disco podcast in March O’Meara explained: “When you get a tattoo of someone, you become a sort of information kiosk.” O’Meara later describes an exchange with a librarian at USC’s Cinematic Arts Library: “I even sheepishly rolled up my left sleeve to show him the tattoo of Milicent and the Creature. I’m so deeply invested in this project that asking me about it is like asking a new parent to show you pictures of their baby.”
I don’t have a tattoo of Annie Sawyer Downs, but I did name my kid after her. Asking me to show you pictures of my baby is literally asking me to dive into the story of my Milicent Patrick. I loved following O’Meara’s journey as she tracked down the pieces of Patrick’s life because I’ve done that too — I finagled an invitation to the Maine summer house that Annie Sawyer Downs’ built, I found her herbarium specimens at Harvard, I read through her collaborator’s field notes and could not help but notice that after she mentored him for the better part of a decade he went on to found a botanical club that did not admit women as members. I’m so happy that O’Meara got to write the book on Patrick — and I really did love this book — but I found the whole experience of listening to it to be bittersweet, and not just because the misogyny that ended Patrick’s career still hangs over Hollywood — and everywhere else. It was bittersweet for me to watch someone else find their Annie Sawyer Downs, tie up the loose ends, and bring a full story to light because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that for Annie. Annie died almost a century before Milicent Patrick, her trail is colder, her work is less renowned, there is no cult following of Rhododendron canadense forma albiflora like there is for the Creature**. And, as much as I feel Annie deserves a book like The Lady from the Black Lagoon, I know there are countless fully erased BIWOC in my field who didn’t even get to leave behind a name, let alone a trail of breadcrumbs, for future historians to follow. And so, once again Milicent Patrick is a kind of singular woman — a stand in for a whole suite of women who have given the faintest glimmer of representation to my generation, a small hope that we could see ourselves in them, even if we couldn’t read their full story in a book or Wikipedia page. Maybe I can’t have that for Annie, but I’d love to read the story of another ecologist’s Milicent Patrick figure next — write that book and/or send me your recommendation!
*Still, some science creeps in to the science fiction, for example in O’Meara’s footnote on page 19: “Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983. Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Directory in 2010, the first and only. Sixty women have been to space. It’s harder for women to get into Hollywood than it is for us to get to space.”
**There definitely should be more botanical cult classics.
How to Write About the Science You (and Others) Did
I bought Stephen B. Heard’s The Scientist’s Guide to Writing at ESA in 2016. I was a soon-to-be sixth year PhD student with one publication (my master’s thesis) and zero written dissertation chapters. Maybe not exactly zero — there were chunks of methods paragraphs from grant proposals, and a super-rough-draft of chapter 1 shared with collaborators from another university — but close enough that my plans to defend in the spring were borderline comical. I needed writing advice and a structured plan: The Scientist’s Guide to Writing was my magical guidebook, my used Potions textbook annotated by the Half-Blood Prince. I read it methodically, one chapter at a time, and it worked — by March I had four chapters and a viable defense date. I received other lucky breaks besides the perfect reading material: a postdoc fellowship provided motivation to finish the PhD, my parents hosted a writing retreat for my last chapter; there were awesome babysitters, baristas who slipped me extra shots of espresso, and committee members who provided prompt and constructive feedback along the way. But, I still turn to reading when I need help writing.
Earlier this month I covered my favorite new advice papers on How to Do the Science. This week — my favorite recent papers on How to Write About the Science You (and Others) Did: Dr. Scott Hotaling’s Publishing papers while keeping everything in balance: Practical advice for a productive graduate school experience and Dr. Emma Sayer’s The anatomy of an excellent review paper. I like the contrasting perspectives here: Hotaling as a newly minted PhD explains the context for getting the writing done — creating a habit of writing and organizing tasks — while Sayer provides critical advice for the writing that must be accomplished once you have achieved Hotaling’s headspace and you are deep into drafting a review paper. Hotaling’s system will get you to the desk; Sayer’s will polish the word document that’s languishing in your Review Paper file.
Hotaling’s Publishing papers while keeping everything in balance: Practical advice for a productive graduate school experience began as an informal pep talk: he was a postdoc with a good publishing record and grad students in his new department turned to him for advice. “I realized that, like me in graduate school, the students knew they needed to be writing papers (or their thesis) but they didn’t know where to start from a practical standpoint,” he explains. “So, I decided to write down my approach to working to at least give students a jumping off point. When I started looking in the literature, I realized that much of the existing advice came for more senior academics and was often much more cynical than I felt was necessary. Ultimately, I felt I could fill a need by offering my own positive, but realistic, take on how to be productive in graduate school. Once I began writing it, I realized that it should really be a more holistic perspective with advice for being productive mixed with good practices for developing (and maintaining!) collaborations, taking care of your mental health, etc.”
Though Hotaling offers advice that seems more universal and traditional (journals have been publishing writing advice to grad students for a long time) than how to do urban ecology work on private property, I wondered if he ran into the same resistance (3x rejected) from journal editors that Dyson had experienced. “It was difficult!” Hotaling agreed. “I reached out to a number of journal editors and received replies that varied from encouraging rejections to one editor who essentially asked why I wasted my time writing something so useless. Ideas in Ecology & Evolution was the first journal I formally submitted the manuscript to and it wound up being a great home for it.”
Sayer’s advice paper zooms in on writing an excellent review paper. She wrote to me: “To give you a bit of background – I’m a big advocate for the importance of effective science communication. I do a lot of work with early-career researchers on presenting science in various formats to different audiences.” Sayer’s advice paper is built on a deep history of this work. “I started creating guides for the British Ecological Society when I was a postdoc – I’ve written guides on giving talks at conferences and designing science posters (the latter is now used as the society’s guidelines). Within a couple of years of starting my own research group, I had students and postdocs from 7 different countries and many of them struggled with the same aspects of science writing. I compiled a short guide for them, which turned into The British Ecological Society Short Guide to Scientific Writing (and will be published formally in Functional Ecology this year). In the meantime, I had taken on the role of reviews editor for Functional Ecology. Based on the success of the “Short Guide” and my experience in handling review papers from different subdisciplines, the other editors asked if I would try to write a guide for review papers...”
Most of the authors I talked with for this blog post wrote their advice papers as grad students — they were writing the paper they wanted to read early in their careers — but Sayer writes from a more established point in her career. I asked if she thought writing review papers is just a topic that requires more experience. “In this case, yes, having greater experience certainly helped. I’ve always preferred reviews that synthesise information and create something new from the published literature, but it wasn’t until I became Reviews Editor for Functional Ecology that I realised how useful a set of guidelines would be. We learn to summarise information but synthesising it is much harder and is quite an abstract concept to explain to someone.” I too have noticed this steep learning curve between being able to summarize the literature, and being able to add something to the conversation. I first read the short and sweet (three pages!) The anatomy of an excellent review paper early in the group-writing phase of my own review paper (Berend et al. 2019, accepted!). I found myself returning to our google doc with new eyes (which, in an inside joke to myself, I named “Box 1-tinted glasses”) and re-structured our outline around central concepts.
In Part 1 of this series Dr. Ziter had reflected, “I started out thinking this is the paper I wish I had been able to read as a graduate student, and of course by the time the paper came out I was starting my own lab, so now I think I'm so excited that MY grad students will be able to read this before they start fieldwork.” Similarly, Sayer wrote The anatomy of an excellent review paper from the perspective of a PI reminiscing on resources she wished she could have had earlier. “I initially wrote the Short Guide to Scientific Writing for my research group – partly because it described the kind of research papers I wanted to read, but also because I would have loved something like that when I started writing.”
Both Hotaling and Sayer felt that the peer-review process added value and reach to their advice. Hotaling writes, “I chose to publish it as a peer-reviewed paper for two reasons. First, I wanted reviewer input on the paper. I received extensive feedback from my lab and academic friends, but it was important that it also be reviewed by people outside of my day-to-day sphere. It’s a very a personal paper and I needed to know that people who didn’t know me personally still found value in the paper. I’d like to add that the reviewers of the paper (Drs. Meryl Mims and Robert Denton) were exceptional and their feedback greatly strengthened the final paper. And second, from a more practical perspective, it was better for my own career that it be published as a peer-reviewed article.” Sayer echoes, “First and foremost, [peer review] ensures quality – the content has been scrutinised and improved in response to feedback, which gives the reader more confidence in the advice. Then there’s the question of recognition – a lot of work goes into writing guidelines, and thousands of authors have downloaded the paper. It may not attract citations, but it’s still important that the contribution is acknowledged. Last but not least, publishing guidelines as a peer-reviewed paper or editorial makes them much easier to find.”
Since Sayer’s advice emphasizes how to structure a paper, I asked if she had leaned on other advice papers for guidance on structure or tone — essentially, what peer-reviewed advice influenced her presentation of peer-reviewed advice. “There are quite a few papers about writing reviews in other subject areas that I cited in the guidelines.” Here, I need to point out that the short references section in Sayer’s paper is an excellent resource for nerds like me that strive to read their way into better writing. Sayer notes that all of the references contain great advice, but no single paper contained all the information she wanted — that’s why she wrote hers! Her own favorite/favourite advice paper is subject-specific: “I give all my students the 1991 paper by Eberhardt and Thomas on Designing Environmental Field Studies (Ecological Monographs 61:53-73) – it gives a great overview of experimental design and introduces lots of important considerations for developing field work. My other favourite is a book, rather than a paper, but it’s a great read and incredibly useful for communicating research: Made to Stick by Heath and Heath (Random House).”
I asked Hotaling about his favorite advice papers too. We have similar learning styles — he says, “I read a lot of similar papers while writing my own. I particular enjoyed John Smol’s 2016 Some advice to early career scientists: Personal perspectives on surviving in a complex world for its clear, conversational perspective and that paper was a big reason why I ultimately submitted my article to the same journal (Ideas in Ecology and Evolution). Beyond academia, I also drew inspiration from Stephen King’s 2000 memoir “On Writing” and specifically his approach to a regular, ritualistic writing routine. If there’s one takeaway from my paper that I hope early career scientists will try out, it would be developing a regular, daily writing habitat. It’s staggering what such a simple practice can yield in terms of productivity and, at least for me, satisfaction with my work. By writing every day, I feel far less stressed about finishing things and more able to balance my work and life in a healthy way.”
I’m drawn to advice papers, in part, because they can ameliorate imposter syndrome; they say, of course you don’t know this yet, but here, I have given you a guide and you can quietly take this pdf to your favorite chair, curl up with a mug of tea, and have an introvert’s field day. Good advice papers can be a kind of pensieve — the instrument in Dumbledore’s office that allowed wizards in Harry Potter to share their memories, and immerse themselves in each others' past experiences. I love these particular pensieves and the stories behind their publication — thank you so much to Drs. Dyson, Ziter, Broman, Hotaling, and Sayer!
References:
Sayer, E. J. (2018). The anatomy of an excellent review paper. Functional Ecology, 32(10), 2278–2281. http://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.13207
Hotaling, S. (2018). Publishing papers while keeping everything in balance: Practical advice for a productive graduate school experience. Ideas in Ecology and Evolution, 11, 1–12. http://doi.org/10.4033/iee.2018.11.5.f
I remember feeling a spark of urgent curiosity when I found a copy of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten on a shelf in the guest bedroom. I was 11. And though I had made it to middle school, I had never attended kindergarten. This book contained information that I lacked and needed. I hid under the guest bed and read it cover-to-cover.
This character trait — this drive to read my way into knowledge — is still going strong in my life as an early career ecologist. Recently, I turned to Dr. Marieke Frassl’s 2018 Ten simple rules for collaboratively writing a multi-authored paper as I took on a leadership role writing a paper with my postdoc cohort. Reading this guide for collaborative writing gave me a new sense of focus and energized me for the ensuing work of organizing notes, framing our paper, and planning for an upcoming writing retreat.
I’m a reader, and so it shouldn’t be surprising that I seek paper-based advice in the stacks of my #365papers To Read Pile. Reflecting on the helpful scaffolding that I found in Ten simple rules for collaboratively writing a multi-authored paper, I pulled out my favorite Advice Papers from the last year. Flipping through the pdfs, I wondered, Why do we publish advice in journals? Why did these papers, which often echo advice I’ve already received in person or on twitter, resonate so much for me? What does it mean to offer your advice via peer-reviewed papers?
One of the major perks of writing for PLoS Ecology is the opportunity to cold-email scientists (or work-email scientist-friends) and pick their brains about their papers on exploding pollen, unexpected biodiversity hotspots on historic battlefields, and epic fieldwork roadtrips. So, I started writing to the authors of my favorite Advice Papers. This exercise took on a life of its own as Advice authors shared their stories, and their advice, with me. At the same time, I started collaborating on my own Advice Paper with coauthors. The project of selecting the year’s top Advice Papers has expanded beyond my initial curiosity and grown way too long for a single blog post. Here is the first of a two-part series on the best recent Advice Papers in ecology — Part One: How to Do the Science.
The two best papers I read on doing science were Broman and Woo’s 2018 Data Organization in Spreadsheets in The American Statistician and Dyson et al’s 2019 Conducting urban ecology research on private property: advice for new urban ecologists in Journal of Urban Ecology. I ranked Data Organization in Spreadsheets as one of my top-ten Summer 2018 papers, and I continue to stan this lovely guide to foundational data management. While my research is largely National Parks-based and urban ecology on private property seems to fall outside of my wheelhouse, I appreciate the framework for planning urban fieldwork in Dyson’s paper, and my friend Carly Ziter is a coauthor. When the paper came out, Carly tweeted “A few of us ECR urban ecologists got together and wrote the paper we wish we had been able to read before starting private property research.” At the time, I was hip-deep in revisions with a few alpine ECR ecologists on the paper that we wished we had been able to read before starting common garden research. I had to read someone else’s version of the paper they’d wished they’d been able to read and see that this process could be completed.
Dr. Karen Dyson explained, “During my first (urban) field season I realized very quickly that I had had no idea what I was getting myself into.” She was surprised by the time commitment needed for communicating with private property owners to set up site visits and experienced the gamut of hospitality from having security called on her to being subject to overly-friendly non-stop talkers. “Basic things like bathroom breaks required more planning than you would expect. If I recall correctly, it was this last point that I was commiserating with my co-author Tracy about when the first idea for this paper came about.” Second author Dr. Carly Ziter agreed, “Like Karen, I didn't know many people working on private land when I started my PhD fieldwork, and I really just muddled through it pretty naively.” Private property is an important part of the urban ecological landscape, but the challenges of working on private property mean that urban ecology research is often conducted through remote sensing or from a sidewalk. Dyson wrote, “You’re never going to understand ecology in cities if you don’t engage with people—and not just park administrators, but the individuals who make myriad decisions each day on every parcel about what trees to cut down, what shrubs to plant, etc. All this is critical to furthering the field, and we wanted to see more of it, done well, with sensitivity to the people whose lives we’re intruding on.”
Dyson put together a workshop on the topic for ESA 2016, and Ziter attended. She remembers thinking, “finally, other people who get what this is like!” Dyson interviewed Ziter for the paper, and as Ziter remembers, “at some point, I think I more or less invited myself onto the team (thanks Karen et al!). I started out thinking this is the paper I wish I had been able to read as a graduate student, and of course by the time the paper came out I was starting my own lab, so now I think I'm so excited that MY grad students will be able to read this before they start fieldwork.”
I asked Ziter and Dyson why they decided that this advice needed to be presented in a peer-reviewed paper. Ziter notes that “Urban ecology is growing really quickly right now. And as the field grows, there are more and more students collecting urban data whose advisors/labmates are not trained in urban ecology or urban field methods (e.g. in my case, I was the only urban-focused grad student in my lab). So there isn't that passed-down or institutionalized knowledge present within research groups to help students get started.” And, as Dyson recognizes, “Peer-review is more permanent and has gravitas, and can be cited as a reason for doing something. We also wanted open source, since it’s accessible to those without library connections. Also, this is a serious subject that needs to be treated seriously, and often isn’t… which is also why we interviewed almost 30 people from as many countries as we could and went searching outside the discipline for role models.” There’s definitely some field site pride on the line. Carly explains the exasperation of hearing, “oh you do urban ecology? Your fieldwork must be so easy.” “Really the logistics are often more challenging than working in traditional field sites. So it was personally really rewarding to be able to help Karen and the team articulate in a more formal way that hey, this isn't just in our heads, there really are unique and pervasive challenges inherent in this kind of work (just as there are challenges inherent in more remote field ecology that we don't face!)”
The origin story behind Data Organization in Spreadsheets is a bit different from Dyson’s work to build a coalition dedicated to capturing and publishing best practices for field work on private property. Dr. Karl Broman’s website on organizing data in spreadsheets — “largely a response to a particularly badly organized set of data from a collaborator” — already existed when Jenny Bryan and Hadley Wickham were organizing a special issue on Data Science for the journal The American Statistician. He admits that, “it seemed unnecessary to write an article when I could already point people to the website,” and he backed out of his promise to contribute to the special issue. But, he reports, “Jenny didn't want me to back out and asked several friends if they'd help me to write the article, and Kara Woo agreed to do that and did the bulk of the work of rearranging the content in the form of an article and adding an introduction citing relevant literature.”
The peer review process for Data Organization in Spreadsheets was fairly straightforward. Broman writes, “every article solicited for the issue was assigned two reviewers from among the authors of other articles. The reviews were constructive and helpful. After the review, the article was published at PeerJ Preprints and also formally submitted to American Statistician...American Statistician is paywalled; available to most statisticians but not many others. I paid some huge fee (like $3500) to make it open access, since the target audience for the paper is much broader. I hemmed and hawed about whether to pay to make it OA; the fee seemed way too high, and the material was already available both at PeerJ Preprints and as a website. But I did pay and I'm glad I did, because I think way more people have read the paper, as a consequence of it being free. If people find the paper and it's available, they'll read it, but I think if they get a paywall, they're not likely to look further to find a free version.”
In contrast, the urban ecology peer review process was long and winding, though it also included a PeerJ Preprint. When it was finally published, Dyson shared the journey in a twitter thread. “It was desk rejected from Landscape and Urban Planning and Methods in Ecology and Evolution and rejected after review from Urban Ecosystems.” She remained dedicated to the paper throughout: “Since I ran the workshop at ESA 2016 and a well-attended poster at ESA 2107, we knew there was a need for it among students…We also put it in PeerJ preprints and it was one of the top five read/visited papers of 2018. So despite getting very frustrated with the process, we didn’t really lose faith in the manuscript—though we did give it complete reorganization after the rejection from Urban Ecosystems. We saw Journal of Urban Ecology was doing a free open access as they got started and decided ‘why not?’ since they’d also published Pickett and McDonnell’s The art and science of writing a publishable article. They’ve been lovely throughout the process—and have been great about re-tweeting and promoting the paper. It’s now one of their most read articles.” Here, Ziter chimed in to say, “I should disclose that I am sometimes the thumbs behind that twitter account. So that's why it got good twitter press ;). But I have no other role in the journal decisions or review process - so the rest of the loveliness is on them!”
Finally, I asked Broman and Dyson if they had any favorite Advice Papers. Dyson answered with an enthusiastic “Yes! In general, I love advice papers and papers that compare methodology, so I enjoyed putting this one together and hope to do more!” (I agree — we should write an urban-alpine ecology crossover!). She highlighted, “Hilty and Merenlender’s 2003 paper that deals with many of these issues (though not as in depth) on rural private property… [and] we used a few papers as models when we were writing (and re-writing) our manuscript, including Harrison’s Getting started with meta‐analysis; Goldberg et al’s Critical considerations for the application of environmental DNA methods to detect aquatic species; and particularly Clancy et al’s Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault.”
Broman writes that he didn't seek out any advice papers for guidance/structure while writing Spreadsheets. He muses, “I think the main advice papers I'm familiar with are those "ten tips for ..." [sic] at PLoS Computational Biology, which have been really useful though I think the formula has become a bit grating. I also really like Bill Noble's paper on organizing projects.”
Thanks to Broman, Dyson and Ziter for sharing their advice and adding to my reading list. Both of these papers are well-written and offer tangible, useful advice. I’ve found myself ruminating on them as I plan future fieldwork, and definitely wishing I could have read them much earlier as I wrap up old projects and wrestle with my old data.Stay tuned for Part Two: How to Write About the Science You (and Others) Did.
References:
Dyson, K., Ziter, C., Fuentes, T. L., & Patterson, M. S. (2019). Conducting urban ecology research on private property: advice for new urban ecologists. Journal of Urban Ecology, 5(1), 48–10. http://doi.org/10.1093/jue/juz001
Broman, K. W., & Woo, K. H. (2018). Data Organization in Spreadsheets. The American Statistician, 72(1), 1–10. http://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2017.1375989
Recently, I was wrapping up some revisions on a phenology paper and to comply with the journal’s style for taxonomy, I needed to know the authority on a species of white violets that a Maine hunting guide had noted in his diaries in the mid-twentieth century. Obviously, I turned to Wikipedia.
Ecologists who study phenology (or anything!) use Wikipedia all the time, but Dr. John C. Mittermeier and his coauthors take this practice to a whole new level in their paper A season for all things: Phenological imprints in Wikipedia usage and their relevance to conservation. This study, published in PLoS Biology earlier this month, uses Wikipedia page views to trace when humans show seasonal interest in the natural world. For over 30,000 species in 245 languages —which amassed 2.33 billion pageviews between July 2015 and June 2018 — they found some strong seasonal signals linking how and when people interact with plants and animals online.
“The idea for this study happened somewhat by chance to be honest,” Dr. Mittermeier confides. “I was collecting Wikipedia pageview data on different animals as part of another study (hopefully this should be published soon!) and on a whim I decided to plot a time-series of daily views to see what it looked like.” As an ornithologist, he was drawn to migratory bird data and his whimsical time-series plot for migratory bird page views peaked near its ecological migration season. This was the prototype for a figure in the PLoS Biology paper. Mittermeier says, “this [plot] made me curious as what other plants and animals might show seasonality in their views and how widespread these patterns might be in general.”
While searching for migratory birds on Wikipedia seems categorically different from actual birding, Mittermeier and his colleagues found strong correlations between these two activities. They compared trends in Wikipedia page views to eBird records. In this analysis, eBird frequency records are like “outdoor pageviews” of bird species. “It was easy to match the eBird taxonomy to the taxonomy used by Wikipedia,” Mittermeier says, “and the way in which seasonal abundance information was structured in eBird is very accessible.”
Birders, like Wikipedia users, are surprisingly great at generating big data. Just under half of the bird species in the dataset had page view patterns correlated with seasonal eBird records. But, for species that occurred in more than one of the four language/countries (Italy, Germany, Sweden, and the U.S.), just over a third showed a significant positive relationship between eBird frequency and pageviews across multiple languages. All of the countries in this analysis are in the northern hemisphere and experiencing basically the same seasons, so I asked Mittermeier if this result indicated that some birds are more "seasonally famous" in one location? He agreed that “some species do seem to be more “seasonally famous” than others, meaning that certain species may be viewed more as seasonal indicators. This could be a result of the behavior of the species (i.e. something about their seasonality is particularly visible and obvious), some sort of cultural context (maybe the species featured in a well known book or fairy tale and had a seasonal association there, for example), or some sort of combination of both of these. Comparing how seasonal indicator species are similar or different across languages would be a great way to gain insight into what leads to a species acquiring this significance. I think this is a fascinating question and one that would be very interesting to explore further.”
But, the paper is not limited to birds, and human interest in animal and plant Wikipedia pages is not always aligned with ecological events. Figure 2 shows a spike in shark species page views that aligns with Shark Week. There are cultural drivers to the phenology of when humans search out certain species on Wikipedia. Mittermeier shares that, “The Wild Turkey was actually the first page that I looked at in relation to cultural events. Turkeys have such a powerful association with the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States I was curious as to whether this would impact people’s online searches (it does as we show in the figure!)” When the turkey hunch worked out, Mittermeier started brainstorming other cultural or marketing events associated with plants or animals that could impact online interest. “This was right around the time that Shark Week was going on over the summer and that’s why I decided to check if that had an impact on pageviews for Great Whites.”
While the eBird community is full of self-proclaimed bird nerds, and eBird datahas been used inpeer-reviewed papers for over a decade, the programming around Shark Week has a decidedly different relationship to science and natural history. Dr. David Shiffman, a Liber Ero Postdoctoral Fellow in Conservation Biology at Simon Fraser University, studying how information related to sharks is spread on the internet, notes, “Shark Week has a well documented problematic relationship with the truth, spreading nonsense to its massive audience that I and other scientists have to spend years correcting.” I asked him what he thought about the Wikipedia-Shark Week connection that Mittermeier and coauthors uncovered. He says, “the temporary spike in public interest in sharks that Shark Week causes is something that the marine biology community takes advantage of to spread actual facts. This paper provides further evidence that scientists wishing to engage in public outreach about their area of expertise need to know their audience, and know that there are times of year when people are more likely to be receptive to learning about that topic!” Indeed, these seasonal patterns in interest — whether for migratory birds, Thanksgiving turkeys, or sharks — can be leveraged by conservation practitioners to affect policy and outreach.
Research into the public attitudes about species, including how they rise and fall seasonally, is important. Mittermeier and his coauthors write: “Seasonal changes in human interest in plants and animals can have an important role in conservation in at least three ways: (a) by identifying species for which phenology forms a component of their “value,” (b) by helping to reveal differences or similarities in how species are valued across cultural groups, and (c) by providing temporal awareness to help maximize the effectiveness of conservation marketing campaigns.” I’ve experienced this myself in a small way: when I publish papers on spring wildflowers in the dead of winter, the press releases don’t get much traction.
And finally, I had to address the paradox of scholarly work based on Wikipedia. I’ve TA-ed intro Biology labs and scrawled “not peer-reviewed” next to many Wikipedia-base citations in lab reports. Mittermeier laughed with me, “My mother used to teach junior high school and was always telling her students not to cite Wikipedia and now here I am using it as the source for my research.”
Reference:
Mittermeier JC, Roll U, Matthews TJ, Grenyer R (2019) A season for all things: Phenological imprints in Wikipedia usage and their relevance to conservation. PLoS Biol 17(3): e3000146. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000146
This is a deep dive into my own research — the backstory behind a single line in a recently published paper and the data-driven trip down memory lane that was spurred by an innocent question from Reviewer 2.
This research took place on Wabanaki land. I want to respectfully acknowledge the Maliseet, Micmac, Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy tribes, who have stewarded this land throughout the generations. I am certainly not the first person to devote time and energy to tracking seasonal changes on Mount Desert Island.
This week one of my dissertation chapters, Trails-as-transects: phenology monitoring across heterogeneous microclimates in Acadia National Park, Maine, was published in the journal Ecosphere. In this project, I pulled the space-for-time trick and hiked three mountains repeatedly to collect a lot of phenology observations across diverse microclimates. The mountains in Acadia are not huge — these granite ridges roll up from the Gulf of Maine and top out at 466 m — but my transect hikes were between 4.8 km and 9.7 km each, and I wore out a pair of trail runners each season. I took to heart Richard Nelson’s advice: “There may be more to learn by climbing the same mountain a hundred times than by climbing a hundred different mountains.”
A couple months ago, in our second round of reviews, Reviewer 2 noted, “I think that it would be useful for those wanting to replicate your transect-as-trails approach (especially land managers) to know approximately how many person hours it took to complete a transect observation, here in the main text or in the appendix.” I had a magnet (which is apparently also available as a coaster) hanging next to my desk in grad school: over a silhouette of a golden retriever with three tennis balls in its mouth, it reads: “If it’s worth doing…it’s worth overdoing.” This magnet perfectly describes my response to Reviewer 2. I sent a back-of-the-envelope estimate to my coauthors, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the precise person hours per transect was a knowable statistic. In addition to my field notes scribbled into weatherproof notebooks, I had collected my data via fulcrum, a smartphone app that automatically recorded the time of each observation. From my cache of fulcrum csv and xlsx files, I should be able to automatically pull the time of the first and last observation of each transect. The 10.7 MB of data in my fulcrum files represented four years of field work, hours and hours on the trails, slogging through rain, snow, and sun, training field assistants, combing through patches of lowbush blueberry and mountain cranberry for the first, hidden open flower.
I became obsessed with the idea of seriously calculating person hours per transect, but I was increasingly convinced that a single number would be meaningless. I also realized that I lacked the coding chops to deal with my messy raw data: 171 files, each with 77 columns, usually containing data from a single transect, but occasionally comprising half a transect (when we had to bail due to weather) or more than one transect (when I ran ambitious double-days, or my field assistants and I split up). I turned to Porzana Solutions, and Auriel Fournier expertly helped me unlock my person hours data.Over 177 the hikes in my fulcrum files, the mean time between first and last observation is 3.51 hours.
Three and a half hours does not even begin to tell the story. This blog post is my second supplemental appendix. Here is the story of person hours per transect — the lead time, the pregnant field season, and the phenology of phenology monitoring.
Before the first observation and after the last
There is a lead time in every transect hike. After rolling out of bed, pulling on the same old running shorts, race tshirt, and powder blue sunglasses, after packing the same handful of granola bars, dried papaya, and sharp cheddar, zipping my phone into its waterproof case, and slinging my backpack into the passenger seat, after driving to the trailhead and placing my research permit on my dashboard, there’s still a gap between the start of the fieldwork and the first official observation of the day. Especially as the summer crowds began arriving in June, I had to get out early to grab a spot at the limited parking by the north or the south end of Pemetic, or else add some extra miles from a spillover lot*. Even at the best parking spot, the approach to the Sargent South Ridge trailhead requires navigating 0.7 miles of carriage roads between the car and the trail on every hike. When I started the project in 2013, the Sequester kept Park Loop Road closed late into the spring season. For the first six weeks of fieldwork, I walked along the empty road to access Cadillac North Ridge, and Pemetic North and South Ridge.
The transect hikes were 4.8 km (Pemetic), 9.2 km (Cadillac), and 9.7 km (Sargent) up the North Ridge and down the South Ridge or vice versa (all of the mountains had uncreatively named north and south ridge trails). So at the end of a transect, I was 4.8, 9.2, or 9.7 km away from my car. I could run the carriage roads to connect the trailheads after Sargent or Pemetic (a 6.6 km run post-Sargent, and 7.2 km run post-Pemetic). From Cadillac South Ridge, a run up Route 3 to park loop road got me back to the north ridge trailhead in 10 km. Sometimes I arranged rides with friends to skip the run, and when I had funding for field assistants in 2015 and 2016 we often carpooled to drop a car at the finish line for each other. (There were some benefits to this running routine — in 2014 I won free ice cream after placing third in my age group in the Acadia Half Marathon.)
The person hours per transect statistic is limited because not every transect was a straight shot. Sometimes we had to bail 3km into a hike due to bad weather and finish the transect another day. Once, one of my field assistants took a wrong turn and recorded phenology observations on the wrong trail down Pemetic, and so I went back, retraced her steps, and picked up the right trail the next day. Once, I did a wild two-a-day and in the middle of Cadillac, I ran down the Canon Brook Trail, looped through the Pemetic transect, and then ran back up the Cadillac West Face Trail to finish Cadillac. Once, I had a friend in town and we caught a ride to the summit of Cadillac and then enjoyed the leisurely hike down the south ridge with my eight-month-old in the baby backpack.
While the time between first and last observation averaged just over 4 hours for Cadillac, 2.5 hours for Pemetic, and 3 hours and 40 minutes for Sargent, those times discount the bookends of the hikes. As much as I’m railing against the answer to my query here, the process of working with Porzana Solutions to calculate these times has been incredibly rewarding. I feel like I’m getting to know my both raw data and the tidyverse in a weirdly intimate way that goes way beyond a standard tutorial.
The pregnant field season
In 2015 I was 17 weeks pregnant at the start of my field season. In addition to my daughter, I was also joined in the field by two field assistants. According to the Porzana analysis, I hiked less than half as many transects in 2015 (15) compared to each of the two previous years (2013: 35** hikes, 2014: 37 hikes). I actually hiked 20 transects that year — my assistants were entering the data (and getting credit for the hike in fulcrum) while we hiked together in the beginning of the season***. On my solo transects in 2015, I felt sloooooow. I averaged thirty minutes slower than 2013 and 2014 on Cadillac, 50 minutes slower on Pemetic, and 22 minutes slower on Sargent. On top of this, I was covering less ground — in 2013 and 2014 I had monitored phenology in off-trail Northeast Temperate Network plots near my transects in an effort to compare trail-side phenology with forested sites that was ultimately cut from my dissertation. In 2015, I stuck to the trails.
I remember feeling pretty terrible at the beginning of most hikes that year. I had one favorite spruce tree on the south ridge of Sargent, and I can picture myself looking up through the needles on more than one occasion from my lie-down-spot while I tried to decide if a bite of granola bar would make me feel more or less nauseous. As I climbed above treeline and into the breeze the fog of morning sickness would lift, and as I hiked downhill, my daughter would do this funny little fetus-roll and kick in a way that I interpreted to be happy.
Hiking while pregnant was hard, but it felt easier than grappling with the looming challenges of becoming a parent. I liked the hard of fieldwork, it was the kind of hard that I felt capable of conquering. I also loved being pregnant in Bar Harbor. It was my fifth field season in Acadia and I had this wonderful community of supportive colleagues and mentors at the park service and in town. I had a favorite yoga class, a favorite milkshake, a favorite iced chai and blueberry muffin spot. I also had two field assistants — my pregnancy fortuitously aligned with NSF funding! — and working with Ella and Natasha that season was great. The person hours per transect figure obscures my field assistants, folding us into each other and masking the time we spent training together on the ridges. It also hides my pregnancy in the averages. I want to recognize those extra 22-50 minutes: they were some of the best worst minutes of my PhD.
The phenology of phenology monitoring
The person hours per transect average doesn’t show the sprint finishes of June. I monitored thirty species (the paper highlights the 9 most common taxa) of spring-flowering plants. On the transect hikes, I recorded leaf out and flowering phenology. In April, this was a bit of a scavenger hunt, and I’d pour over thickets of shrub stems for the first sign of bud break, then in May I’d peek into each curled Canada mayflower leaf for flower buds. By early June, my plants had leafed out, and the flowering season was winding down. I knew the trails by heart, and the location of each focal taxa along the ridge was bright in my mental map; each transect became a point-to-point trail run between the last phenological hold outs. Did the rhodora finish flowering on Cadillac? Had the last sheep’s laurel buds opened on Pemetic? Were the blueberries beginning to ripen below Sargent’s summit?
As I followed the spring phenology, I grew faster, my calf muscles more defined, my appetite more voracious. Acadia’s steep climbs will whip you into shape. I remember in 2013 arriving in the field a month after passing my comps and feeling so sluggish after a winter of studying instead of running. In comparison, I ran hard in the winter of 2013-2014, set a personal best half marathon time in a trail race in March, and just cruised through the early season field work in 2014. Even in 2015, as I grew rounder each week, I also grew more comfortable with the trails. Hiking while pregnant became easier over the season, although I’m happy it ended when it did, because that trend was not sustainable into the third trimester.
I think about Reviewer #2 and I want to ask: do you mean the person hours per transect in April? Or at the end of June? What kind of mileage were you averaging before the start of the field season? Do you have any old hamstring injuries? Tell me about your field assistants. Do you like to stop for lunch at the summit or are you an on-the-go-snacker? Did you pack a couple bucks to buy a Harbor Bar at the Cadillac souvenir shop? Are you saving your energy for the 10k run at the end of the transect? Is the National Park Service well-funded in this year’s federal budget? How do you feel about stopping for a swim in Sargent Mountain Pond?
I love these questions because each one pulls on a thread winding through my Acadia memories. I hiked upwards of 125 transects between 2013 and 2016, and now that the paper is done, I’m a little sad to be shelving the fieldnotes for good. The trail runners that I wore are long gone, my field hat fell apart, most of my baggy race tshirts carried me through my second pregnancy and suffered for it.
In the end, the idiosyncrasies of the hikes were smoothed and flattened into the sentence, “Each transect could be completed in under 6 person-hours.” This is both true and wildly circumscribed. Not unlike a well done chapter of a PhD dissertation.
*Acadia National Park actually closed the lot by the Pemetic North Ridge trailhead in 2017 and it’s now exclusively a bus stop for the island explorer, the free bus that begins running right as my season wraps up at the end of June.
**This doesn’t include hikes before I had figured out the fulcrum platform. There was "no" data on those hikes (nothing was leafing or blooming, no signs of budburst) and they only exist in my field note books.
***I hired three field assistants for this project and, concurrently, a common garden experiment. In 2014, Paul was my garden guy, but we also hiked two transects together and he hiked two solo. In 2015, Ella, Natasha, and I split the transect and garden work. Ella came back for most of the 2016 season and then I finished the two projects solo in June 2016.
In this space, I’ve often shared my love for National Park-based research. I count myself among the researchers devoting time and energy to documenting how climate change affects the ecosystems and natural resources in U.S. National Parks; we study everything from pikas to forests, Joshua trees to birds. But, the underlying rate of warming in these National Parks was not on my radar and I had not given much thought to the climate exposure of National Parks versus the rest of the United States. It turns out, the parks are literal hotspots on the landscape.
Last fall, Dr. Patrick Gonzalez and coauthors from the University of Wisconsin published ‘Disproportionate magnitude of climate change in United States national parks’ in Environmental Research Letters. This study looked at historical and projected temperature and precipitation across all 417 U.S. National Parks. Between 1895 and 2010, mean annual temperature of the national park area increased at double the U.S. rate — parks warmed by 1.0°C (±0.2°C) per century, the rest of the U.S. land area by 0.5 °C.Dr. Gonzalez is a forest ecologist and Associate Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the Principal Climate Change Scientist of the U.S. National Park Service, but he answered my questions here under his Berkeley affiliation, not for the Park Service.
I asked why he wanted to study a spatial analysis of historical and projected climate across all 417 US National Parks. What was the motivation for expanding on the earlier work of researchers who presented similar findings for the 289 large parks in the National Park System system?
“Up until our research, the severity of climate change across all the US national parks was unknown.” Gonzalez writes. “The previous work had only looked at subsets of parks. I work at a national level and it is important for me to give national policy-makers scientific information that is robust and comprehensive. The time-consuming parts of the work were the individual analyses by park and the computational tasks of downscaling all available general circulation model output of future climate projections to 800 m spatial resolution, which had not previously been accomplished for the U.S.”
In addition to the climate exposure of National Parks, Gonzalez and his team considered climate velocities. Climate velocity is the speed at which a plant or animal will need to move, migrate, or disperse — usually north or upslope — to “catch up” to their climate as it changes. Gonzalez found an interesting paradox in climate velocities: the park lands have experienced extreme temperature and precipitation shifts, but they also show lower climate velocity than the U.S. as a whole. They point out that this does not mean that plants and animals in National Parks are not in peril: “The lower climate velocities in the national park area are an artifact of that indicator being calculated as horizontal movement of areas of constant climate. Climate velocity can underestimate exposure in mountains.”
The National Parks are more mountainous than the rest of the United States. This is a reflection of our unsystematic history of serendipitous-style protection; we collect the pretty places as national parks, without considering the underlying biophysical diversity, and mountains are very pretty places. So while moving a couple meters upslope might seem easier than moving hundred of meters north to track a suitable climate, this is often an oversimplification. “Despite the computational artifact, our results indicate that projected climate velocities in national parks could exceed maximum natural dispersal capabilities of many trees, small mammals, and herbaceous plants.” Gonzalez elaborates, “Any new protection of natural areas, whether close to or far from national parks, can add to global conservation of ecosystems for biodiversity and human well-being.”
I asked Gonzalez if he had any thoughts on how the research could be interpreted for park visitors. I wanted to know if there is an effort to get this work not just to park managers on the ground, but to interpretive staff as well. “For national park interpreters, I’ve given many presentations directly to staff in individual parks, including interpreters,” he says. “I encourage all U.S. National Park Service staff to speak about the robust science of climate change and its human cause, which points us to solutions to saving America’s most special places.”
Finally, I noticed that both this paper and the earlier National Park System climate exposure study, which covered 289 large parks, were published in open access journals. I asked if this was an intentional pattern and these research teams were hoping to reach managers who may not have access to peer-reviewed journal articles.
Gonzalez confirmed that, “the open access of the journal of course enabled a much larger audience to directly download and read the original work. This greatly benefited national park staff and other natural resource managers, to whom we aimed to provide information useful for conservation under climate change. Intense interest immediately developed – people downloaded the pdf file more than once a minute in the first 24 hours of publication.”
But their outreach was not limited to open access journals. Gonzalez points out, “public media published over 40 individual stories, including in the Washington Post, on page 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle, on public radio stations, and on television." Gonzalez also wrote a concise summary for the website the Conversation. He says that the University of California, Berkeley, has greatly helped in the effort to reach natural resource managers by publicly posting the spatial data, and he directly provided customized analyses and maps for numerous individual national parks.
Finally, Gonzalez writes, "I just presented the results to the U.S. Congress in a hearing where I testified on human-caused climate change in U.S. national parks. The open access of the journal was critical, but we engaged a broader effort to widely communicate the science.”
Thank you to Dr. Gonzalez and his colleagues for providing the climate data that underlies so much ecological research across the National Park System! And thank you for modeling effective outreach and impressive science communication*!
References:
Gonzalez, P., Wang, F., Notaro, M., Vimont, D. J., & Williams, J. W. (2018). Disproportionate magnitude of climate change in United States national parks. Environmental Research Letters, 13(10), 104001–13. http://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aade09
Monahan WB, Fisichelli NA (2014) Climate Exposure of US National Parks in a New Era of Change. PLoS ONE 9(7): e101302. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0101302 Banner image: photos by Jodi Kurtz, Via Tsuji, and Gabriel Millos, Creative Commons
*if I ever publish a paper that averages one pdf download every minute, I will throw the biggest party and give everyone temporary tattoos of the figures.
Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie | caitlin.mcdonough@gmail.com
