Drawn to Learning

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?

The amazing botanical illustrator and comic artist Liz Anna Kozik inspired me to think about this last month.

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

Summer Reading (Part 2)

Last week I wrote about my favorite new papers on mountains and phenology after a summer of scientific reading. In the second half of my top ten list, I’m highlighting some plant mysteries and best practices of 2018. 

“Plant mysteries” is a label that I’m using to lump together three plant papers that I can’t stop thinking about. They cover some of my favorite methodological quirks — historical field notes, herbarium digitization, citizen science — and two genera that I think are cool — Sibbaldia and Erythronium. The mysteries range from: Is this still here? to Why is this here in two colors?  to Can I get this specimen to tell me what else grew here? without much thematic overlap, but all three papers tell gripping stories. If nothing else, they share a strong natural history foundation and well-executed scientific writing that made for lovely hammock-reading.

“Best practices” are just that — descriptions of how we can improve our science as individuals and collectively. We can design better spreadsheets for our data and we can support gender equity in our scientific societies. I strongly recommend that all ecologists read up on both. 

Plant Mysteries

I didn’t particularly notice [trophy collecting/associated taxa/pollen color polymorphism] before, but now I can’t not see it…

1. Sperduto, D.D., Jones, M.T. and Willey, L.L., 2018. Decline of Sibbaldia procumbens (Rosaceae) on Mount Washington, White Mountains, NH, USA. Rhodora, 120 (981), pp.65-75.

I love this deep dive into the history of snowbank community alpine plant that occurs in exactly one ravine in New England (though it’s globally widespread across Northern Hemisphere arctic-alpine habitats). Over the past four decades, surveys in Tuckerman’s Ravine have documented a continuous decline in the abundance of creeping sibbaldia, and recently researchers have been unable to find it at all. This would make creeping sibbaldia the first documented extirpation of an alpine vascular plant in New England. Dr. Daniel Sperduto and coauthors revisit the photographs and notes from contemporary surveys and find that mountain alders are encroaching on the creeping sibbaldia’s snowbank habitats. These notes also include anecdotes of local disturbances like turf slumping at the sites where creeping sibbaldia used to be found. In herbaria across New England, Sperduto and coauthors discovered sheets covered with dozens of specimens — this “trophy collection activity” in the 19th century led them to calculate that “there are more than three times as many plants with roots at the seven herbaria examined than the maximum number of plants counted in the field within the last 100 years.” I am obviously partial to New England alpine plants, and I got to see Sperduto present this research as a part of an engaging plenary session at the Northeast Alpine Stewardship Gathering in April, so you could write this off as a niche interest. Despite this, I see creeping sibbaldia as a lens for considering the universal mysteries of population decline and extirpation, and the challenges of tying extirpation to concrete cause-and-effect stories. 

2. Pearson, K.D., 2018. Rapid enhancement of biodiversity occurrence records using unconventional specimen data. Biodiversity and Conservation, pp.1-12.

Leveraging herbarium data for plant research is so hot right now. But what if you could squeeze even more information from a specimen label? For example, many collectors note “associated taxa” along with the date and location of collection. The associated taxa are plants that were seen nearby, but not collected — a kind of ghostly palimpsest of the community that grew around the chosen specimen. Herbaria across the globe have spent the past decades digitizing specimens and uploading photographs of their pressed plants. In this process, the associated taxa on specimen labels are often stored in a ‘habitat’ database field. In this impressive single-author paper, Dr. Kaitlin Pearson extracts the associated taxa data from Florida State University’s Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium database with elegant code that can recognize abbreviated binomial names and identify misspellings. She then compared the county-level distributions of the associated taxa database with their known county-level distribution from floras and herbarium specimens. Incredibly “the cleaned associated taxon dataset contained 247 new county records for 217 Florida plant species when compared to the Atlas of Florida Plants.” There are plenty of caveats: the associated taxa can’t be evaluated for misidentification the way a specimen can, and lists of associated taxa are obviously subject to the same spatial biases as herbarium specimens. But this is clearly a clever study with a beautifully simple conclusion: “broadening our knowledge of species distributions and improving data- and specimen-collection practices may be as simple as examining the data we already have.” 

3. Austen, E.J., Lin, S.Y. and Forrest, J.R., 2018. On the ecological significance of pollen color: a case study in American trout lily (Erythronium americanum). Ecology, 99(4), pp.926-937.

Did you read Gelman and Hill’s Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Modelsin a seminar and think, this seems like an amazing resource but I’m an ecologist and examples about school children watching Sesame Street or election outcomes and incumbency for US congressional election races just don’t resonate with me? The ecological and evolutionary mystery of red/yellow pollen polymorphism is super interesting in its own right and Dr. Emily Austen and coauthors thoroughly attack this question. For me — and I’ve admitted here before that I am the kind of learner who benefits from repetition  — Austen’s statistical methods are the star. Austen demonstrates glm best practices and brings stunningly clear plant ecology examples to the Gelman and Hill framework. I would probably teach this paper in a field botany course (trout lilies are charismatic! look at this fun map of pollen color polymorphism!), but I would absolutely prefer to assign it in a statistical methods course, especially as a supplement/set of alternative exercises to Gelman and Hill. 

Best Practices

Do this…

1. Potvin, D.A., Burdfield-Steel, E., Potvin, J.M. and Heap, S.M., 2018. Diversity begets diversity: A global perspective on gender equality in scientific society leadership. PloS one, 13(5), p.e0197280.

Gender equality in biology dramatically decreases as you look up the ladder in academia — compare the gender breakdown in the population of graduate students to tenured professors and gender disparity is stark. Leadership in our field is still heavily male skewed. Dr. Dominique Potvin and her coauthors asked, is this true in scientific societies too? Scientific societies are generally more open than academic departments, and there is more transparency in the process of electing governing boards and leadership positions. Potvin and coauthors leveraged these traits to ask: what is the role of scientific societies in rectifying gender inequity? why are some societies better than others at promoting women in leadership? After considering 202 societies in the zoological sciences, they found that the culture of the society — the age of the society age, size of its board and whether or not a it had an outward commitment or statement of equality — was the best predictor of equality in the gender ratio of society boards and leadership positions. This “outward commitment or statement of equality” covered anything published on the society website — a statement, committee, or other form of affirmative action program — that “implies that the society is dedicated to increasing diversity or improving gender equality.” Of the 202 societies they studied, only 39 (19.3%) had one of these visible commitments to equality. Whether societies with high proportions of female board members were more likely to draft and publish these statements, or whether societies that invested time and energy in producing such commitments attracted more women to leadership positions is a bit of a chicken-and-egg riddle. Societies looking to reflect on their own state of gender equality can take advantage of the resource presented in Table 6: “Health checklist for scientific societies aiming for gender equality.” Assessing gender equality is kind of a low hanging fruit — and the authors encourage societies to reflect on intersectionality and race, age, ethnicity, sexuality, religion and income level as well. Basically, if a scientific society is struggling to support white women in 2018, there’s an excellent chance it is failing its brown, LGTBQ, and first-generation members to a much greater extent.

2. Broman, K.W. and Woo, K.H., 2018. Data organization in spreadsheets. The American Statistician, 72(1), pp. 2-10.

If I could send a paper in a time machine, I would immediately launch Broman and Woo’s set of principles for spreadsheet data entry and storage back to 2009, when I started my master’s project. Reading through this list of best practices made me realize how many lessons I learned the hard way — how many times have I violated the commandments to “be consistent”, “choose good names for things”, or “do not use font color or highlighting as data”? Way too many! Eventually, I pulled it together and developed a data entry system of spreadsheets that mostly conforms to the rules outlined in this paper. But, if I’d read this first, I would have skipped a lot of heartache and saved a lot of time. This is an invaluable resource for students as they prepare for field seasons and dissertation projects. Thank you Broman and Woo, for putting these simple rules together in one place with intuitive and memorable examples! 

Happy Fall Reading! 

Science Twitter and the Secretly Super-rare Saxifragaceae

During one of the coolest experiences of my PhD, I had the opportunity to work as a field assistant on a flora for an iconic park in Maine. The Plants of Baxter State Park is a beautiful book and, if you turn to page 135, there’s a stunning photograph of a carpet of Empetrum atropurpureum, red crowberry — okay, full disclosure it’s my photograph. 

Reflecting on my small contributions to this wonderful book, I remember the sunburns, the crystal clear ponds, the apple cider doughnuts, the black flies, the incredibly cushy shower in one of our crew cabins, and the incredible love I developed for this rugged, cut-over landscape. These expansive memories are tied up in 477 printed pages that sit in a place of honor on my desk. The flora is a snapshot of a place and time: Baxter State Park in 2016. It is already outdated; when I returned to Baxter in Spring 2018 for new research, I heard from the rangers that hikers and botanists had recently found a population of a species we thought was lost from the park —it was in a new, downslope location from its historical site. The limitations of published flora — and the fun of the internet — have led some 21st century botanists to embrace new, technologically innovative tools. In one outstanding example, YouTube, twitter, and iNaturalist played a major role in the discovery of a globally imperiled plant species in Pennsylvania.

Dr. Scott Schuette and coauthors published this finding in a paper that merges social media with early 20th century herbarium specimens, and a gorgeously produced YouTube series with a serious NatureServe Conservation Rank Assessment. They write: “This discovery may also serve as a cautionary tale of relying entirely for plant identification on floras which, through no fault of their own, become incomplete or ‘static’ over time.” “The hidden Heuchera: How science Twitter uncovered a globally imperiled species in Pennsylvania, USA,” published in PhytoKeys in April 2018, is the peer-reviewed version of corresponding author Dr. Chris Martine’s March 2018 YouTube video “Rappelling Scientists Find Rare Species Hiding for 100+ Years.” If you need a break from #365papers, if your ‘To Read’ folder is overflowing with pdfs, if you lost your reading glasses — seriously, it’s summer vacay, you don’t need an excuse — watch the video! 

The episode starts as a quest to re-locate a historical population of the state-endangered plant golden corydalis. Martine, a professor at Bucknell and host of the YouTube series Plants Are Cool, Too! interviews Schuette while botanists in climbing gear rappel down the shale cliff faces of Shikellamy Bluffs above the Susequehanna River*.

After three days, they finally locate the elusive golden corydalis by climbing up from the base of the bluffs. Martine and Schuette shake hands in a classic wrap up scene. And then — record-scratch sound effect, the frame freezes and tilts, and a voiceover exclaims, “normally this is where our episode would end, but this story took another amazing turn…” Martine flashes back to stills from earlier in the episode and sports-commentator-style circles a Saxifragaceae species with coral bell-shaped flowers that had blended into the background as the climbers searched for golden corydalis. 

Throughout the survey, the team — and Martine on twitter — had identified this as the common plant Heuchera americana, American alumroot. A tweet reply from Heuchera expert Dr. Ryan Folk revealed their common plant was very, very uncommon. It was Heuchera alba, a globally imperiled wildflower, endemic to the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia — a plant never before recorded in Pennsylvania. Ultimately, Schuette, Folk, Martine, and coauthor Dr. Jason Cantley found eight populations of H. alba in Pennsylvania, as well as historical evidence that the plant had been there, hidden, for at least a century. When they re-examined herbarium specimens of the two known Pennsylvania Heuchera species, they found four specimens collected between 1905 and 1949 that were actually H. alba.

One of those specimens — housed in Bucknell’s Wayne E. Manning Herbarium — was collected at Shikellamy Bluffs in 1946. By W. Manning. Even the guy who got the herbarium named after himself missed this identification! As the paper title notes, the credit goes to “Science twitter,” a resource that Manning unfortunately did not have when he was botanizing the Shikellamy Bluffs. I asked Schuette and Martine about their social media habits. While all of the paper’s authors had met IRL (in real life), the Plants Are Cool, Too! episode and twitter conversation around H. alba sparked this research through virtual collaboration. Martine says, “I use Twitter nearly every day and see it as part of my job as a scientist and academic. It is my go-to source for keeping up with the latest findings in my disciplines and the most pressing issues in higher education.” Schuette admits that his twitter check-ins were less frequent, “but certainly picked up a bit after the H. alba discovery.” Schuette is active on iNaturalist — parallel to Martine’s twitter mis-identification, Schuette had a similar social-media moment when his iNaturalist post of a Heuchera in Pennsylvania turned out to be H. alba. He explains, “I started on iNaturalist when I started my position with the Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program at the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. I viewed my work as a great opportunity to share the diversity that I see on a day to day basis with the larger naturalist community.” Both Schuette and Martine work in Pennsylvania and their standard botanical reference, the Plants of Pennsylvania flora, lists H. americana and H. pubescens as the only Heuchera species present in the state. Earlier botanists were working under the same assumptions, no one expected to find H. alba in the state — the difference is that in 1946 you couldn’t upload your herbarium specimen to a network of naturalists across a broad geographic range and receive instant feedback on your identification.Martine muses,

“I just saw a Tweet from a scientist saying that she had been told by a senior colleague that "no one who matters" is using Twitter. That is totally false, of course, but I would also say that we are fast approaching a time where it might even be more true to say the opposite: Everyone who matters is using Twitter. They are equally silly statements, really, but my point is that on-line communities like Twitter are now where scientists do a lot of their networking, sharing, and, as shown by our study, collaborating. If you ain't there, you are missing out.”

Schuette echoes this perspective on the great potential for social media in scientific research:

“I think that as field botanists we are constrained by the prevailing taxonomic concepts of the times and places where we work. However with the immense availability of information through online databases and social media outlets, we are in a unique position in history to really increase our understanding of biodiversity at several different scales ranging from local parks to EPA Ecoregions. The fact that H. albahas been here under our noses raises some really interesting biodiversity questions that we can now explore in detail.”

 Finally, I just loved that they were able to name-check “science twitter” in the title of a peer-reviewed paper. I asked if they had received any pushback from the journal. I didn’t know anything about PhytoKeys before this paper appeared in my own twitter feed; for the similarly uninitiated, it is “a peer-reviewed, open access, rapidly published journal, launched to accelerate research and free information exchange in taxonomy, phylogeny, biogeography and evolution of plants.” Martine assured me that it was a smooth process; he had experience publishing new species descriptions in the journal and he had a hunch it would be a good fit for the paper. He says, “In working with [PhytoKeys] I have come to appreciate how progressive they are when it comes to promoting their articles online, including via social media - so we weren't especially surprised when they accepted our title. Personally, I think it was the smart thing to do!”

The metrics on PhytoKeys’ website show that the article has received over 670 unique views and 153 pdf downloads. Martine and Schuette agree that the social media buzz around the paper has been positive and congratulatory. As Martine notes, “people who believe in social media as a way to engage with both the public and one's broader scientific community see it as a confirmation; meanwhile, even people who might poo-poo Twitter as a waste of time for scientists have to admit that it led to a pretty cool discovery in this case.” 

References:Schuette S, Folk RA, Cantley JT, Martine CT (2018) The hidden Heuchera: How science Twitter uncovered a globally imperiled species in Pennsylvania, USA. PhytoKeys 96: 87-97. https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.96.23667

*I do love rock-climbing botanists!

**I'm also a big fan of Rosemary Mosco!