Wrapped and Read: A Reading Advent Update

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.

She's Making a List...

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.

1. Wynn-Grant, R. (2019). On reporting scientific and racial history. Science, 365(6459), 1256.1–1256. http://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay9839

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

 *Hi Max!

**Pregnancy is tough; the last twenty-four days are generally terrible; Congratulations Mary, sincerely.

Writing and Publishing: Mentos, Manatees, and Sinkholes

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 

Looking Closer at Look at Your Fish

“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. 

Learn Again

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. 

All I Really Need to Know I Learned From Peer-Reviewed Papers (Part 2)

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

All I Really Need to Know I Learned From Peer-Reviewed Papers (Part 1)

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 

Early Career Researchers Talk #365papers

I’ve written before about my aspirational, if mercurial, commitment to #365papers — the social media challenge to read one peer-reviewed paper a day. I first attempted the #365papers reading habit three years ago, when I was a new mom returning to my PhD after maternity leave. All of the blogs that I read about #365papers in that new-parent-haze were written by more established folks — professors, who maybe didn’t have tenure yet, but were clearly farther along in their careers. In the years since, I’ve noticed that I was not alone as a grad student wading into #365papers. There are many of us, early (or earlier) career ecologists attempting to read more deeply and more broadly through a paper-a-day. And while I often use this space to blog about some of my favorite papers from my #365papers readings, I rarely reflect on the actual reading part of the equation. So, I reached out to another early career #365papers enthusiast to talk about reading as a grad student, the “luxuries” of being early career, and the daily grind of our #365papers habits.

This is a conversation between myself and Dr. Chelsea Little — Chelsea is a community and ecosystems ecologist, who recently defended her PhD at University of Zurich. She's offered her expert opinion for PLoS Ecology before and she wrote about her year of #365papers on her personal blog in December 2018. Our emails have been edited and reordered for clarity. 

Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie: How did you first get into #365papers?

Chelsea J. Little: I think I generally saw the tag on Twitter, and kind of wondered what it was all about. Eventually I found some of the earlier blog posts from you, Jacquelyn Gill, Meghan Duffy & Anne Jefferson. So I guess the idea just slowly permeated my academic Twitter world until I wanted to try it. At some point I knew, with a sinking feeling, that a lot of people were much better-read than I was. I never had a journal club to be part of in either my bachelors or masters (or maybe there's one I could have joined but I just didn't realize it.... there's a lot of things that we don't figure out as students), and I never had a course reading classic papers, for example. So when colleagues or supervisors would refer to papers offhand by the authors' names in conversation, I felt bad because just couldn't do that. I didn't have a deep well of reading to draw on, and even things that I read, I usually didn't remember who had written them. So I think part of the reason the #365papers idea intrigued me was I saw it as a way I could remedy that.

CMM: I get the same in-over-my-depth feeling when authors' last names are tossed around as stand-ins for papers or concepts or experiments. Even now, I can recognize a name from reading, and know that I know who it is, but not immediately be able to connect it to a specific paper. I don't know if #365papers is making this better or worse, because it's definitely exposed me to A LOT MORE NAMES! It has, however, made me feel less imposter-y — because if I don't know a name, it's not because I'm not well read.

CJL: Yes! I love your comment about "imposter-y" ness. That is so right on.

CMM: When and where do you read your paper a day? What does your reading routine look like — or sound or smell or taste or feel like? (Mine usually tastes like chai.)

CJL: I actually don't really have a reading routine in terms of time. I tried to institute one, but I find that it depends a lot on what else I'm doing. Sometimes it's a nice way to start the day; sometimes it's a nice thing to do after lunch. Over the year of doing it, I have learned that it's a good thing to slot into my intermediate-quality time. I don't want to use my most productive/creative time for reading, I want to use it for writing or stats usually. But it's also not a good thing to do when you are really tired, because if you can't focus or retain anything, then there's no point! So I leave the time when I'm dragging for smaller administrative tasks. Sometimes I read on the train or bus, which helps me leave the office relatively early without feeling too guilty.

CMM: I don't have a designated reading time either. I like moving from my desk to a couch or comfy chair for reading time and settling in with a mug of tea and a nice snack. Reading breaks definitely help during long coding/analysis/figure-making days!

CJL: I usually have a tea or coffee while I'm reading too. I prefer to read on paper (printed out), and use a highlighter to mark interesting or relevant parts of the paper, or places where I have questions or am confused.

CMM: I read on my laptop in Papers, and mark up/highlight on the screen.

CJL: I have a little after-reading routine: I post the paper on Twitter, tagging the authors if they have accounts; I fill out the info in my tracking spreadsheet and I copy my notes into Evernote, writing a little summary of what I found interesting or relevant, and then going through the places that I had highlighted and deciding whether they merit a note that I will be able to refer back to.

CMM: I so am impressed with your routine of summarizing and tracking! I often let #365papers tweets pile up for a week or two at a time before I go back and enter them into my spreadsheet in chunks. I kind of like that my laziness allows me to return to these tweets days/weeks later — it's weirdly fun to revisit my reading patterns this way. Sometimes I find out that I've been on an alpine plant jag, or gone down a paleo deep dive (almost a pun?), or just been all over the place.

CJL: Not having a set routine probably does make it less likely that I fit it in, but I try to really prioritize it. One thing is that I have definitely gotten faster at reading papers. I still try to read them deeply, but I have gotten a little more efficient at doing so, so it's easier to find the time. The other thing I've found is that it's great to mix up what you are doing in a day, so if you really need to write, for example, taking a break to read a paper probably won't hold you back - it will give your brain a rest from what it was focusing on, and then you can get back to it. Noticing that has made me more confident about being able to take that hour, or whatever, and not feel like it is coming at the cost of something else I'm doing. Maybe that's a luxury you only have as an ECR (Early Career Researcher) though :)

CMM: Yes, our ability to take a reading hour without sacrificing something else is a funny “luxury” unique to ECR. As our careers progress, do you think #365papers is sustainable?

CJL: I'm not sure it’s sustainable, but I hope so. It feels different to read a little bit every day, compared to having a period where you are reading a lot, all day. When I think back to the start of my PhD, I was new to this discipline and topic so I felt like I had to read a lot. And I hated it! I had this huge stack of papers that felt like a chore, and to be honest I didn't have enough background yet to really get a lot out of them. Now I'm re-reading some of the same papers and I get so much more the second time through. Part of that is because I now have four years of relevant research under my belt, but I really think that part of it is the mental approach. As I think of moving on to a postdoc soon, I will definitely have to do a lot of reading to get up to speed on a new project. But I will try to do that with one or two papers a day, not sitting down with a mountain of literature and feeling like I can't start the fun, creative part of research until I get through it all! So I think this approach *could* be more sustainable than the alternative, but it will take some deliberate willpower to keep up as I get busier and busier, I guess.

CMM: Yes! Your feeling about reading a little each day resonates with me! My postdoc is in a totally new field from my PhD, but I think #365papers made that transition feel a lot less daunting. I'm 18 months in and I still sometimes read a paper and think, “How have I missed this? I should have read that before I started my postdoc — or before I wrote my postdoc proposal!” But, I think that's probably true even for people who didn't switch sub-disciplines.

CJL: A question for you: how have your bosses and colleagues reacted to you doing all this reading? Do they wish you'd spend the time on something else, or see it as good, or a mix? Do they express jealousy that you can find the time to read?

CMM: Well, since Jacquelyn Gill is my postdoc advisor, sometimes I feel like #365papers is a little performative — I know she's reading my tweets! It’s funny, the hashtag is a way for us to check in when I'm working remotely. It's almost a secret handshake — she probably knows that I'm getting a lit review or a certain grant proposal together just based on the papers that I'm tweeting. I think that my other colleagues who aren't as familiar with #365papers are obliviously supportive — I'm not sure if my PhD advisor noticed the difference when I started reading daily. I do think it made me a better writer — both in terms of the syntax and style, but also because I can call up citations so much more easily. Have you seen the impact of daily reading in your writing?

CJL: Hmmm, how has it impacted my writing. I do think it's easier to find sources, but it does not remove that part of writing when you say something, feeling instinctively that it's proven and true, and then go citation- searching and end up spending three hours trying to find a paper about this thing, and half the time delete the sentence later anyway... :) I think one thing is that it's great to be exposed to different formats and writing styles. You definitely read some papers and think, wow, that is really well written. It has given me some ideas to try, in terms of things like how to really clearly present hypotheses, or how to synthesize. I think it has also given me confidence that there are many ways to write and you don't have to stress so much that your manuscript fits some single standard of academic writing. When I started writing papers, I thought I had to be much more formal and cram tons of information in. Now I focus more on just trying to tell the story in a way that is easy to follow - which can vary a lot from paper to paper depending on what that story is - and I realize that academic writing doesn't have to be boring, sanitized, and overly formal. You of course see examples of poor writing too, but those are also instructive! In that sense, reading a lot probably makes me a much better reviewer, too.

CMM: How do you find the papers that you read? Are you methodical or opportunistic? Do you have favorite journals? Google scholar alerts?

CJL: Most of the papers I find right now are through table of contents alerts, but I also see thing on Twitter and I have a couple of Google Scholar alerts. I'd love to learn how to use those better; I think it's a challenge because you want to pick a term that is not too specific (otherwise you might miss something) but also not too general (otherwise it will bring back too much stuff). I have one for my study taxa, and since it's not a super common research animal that works pretty well and picks up things in smaller journals that I might not find. When I'm working intensely on a paper or project, I of course find things by searching or by following reference trails, or by colleagues/co-authors recommending them. So it kind of depends what phase I'm in. But I think in a lot of ways the most exciting is to get a great journal table of contents and see exciting papers, that may or may not be related to my work at all, and add them to the to- read pile! (My to-read tag in Evernote has 394 papers in it and grows almost every day, so yeah, I guess I better keep reading...)

CMM: I find so many papers through twitter — but I am doing a horrible job of tracking where I first hear about a paper. I started using IFTTT so that if I retweet a paper with #ToReadPile it will automatically get put into my ToDoist Reading List. My google scholar alerts are just my field site (Acadia National Park) and a couple authors. I used to have one for 'phenology' but that was out of control! My To Read Pile sounds like yours — I have eight #ToReadPile tweets in my ToDoist (I try to organize & pull these into Papers about every week); my Papers '#365papers 2019' collection is at 84 unread (and there many more to roll over from '#365papers 2018').

CJL: Do you have many conversations on Twitter based on your posting of these papers? For me it's not so much, but there have been a few times when an author has replied or someone else has commented about reading the same paper, and this has been a neat way to virtually meet new people that I might not have connected to otherwise. I think that could also be a big benefit to ECR's; even if it doesn't happen so often, just a few solid instances like that can make you feel like part of a community.

CMM: I've had a couple twitter conversations with authors. I think more frequently other people have asked me about a paper or asked for a link to it. I'm not great at remembering to add authors' twitter handles to my #365papers (and sometimes I just don't know the authors are on twitter), but I've found that when I do it almost always sparks a nice interaction. I love reading papers that are outside of my field but written by my friends or fellow grad students in my department. It's a nice break from my own work, and it's such a simple way of supporting the people around you.

CJL: I also love reading outside my research area, and this is one of my favorite things about the challenge. If I am reading five papers a week, it's totally reasonable that one or two are kind of far-flung, unless I'm working really intensely on a project. I have pretty broad interests. I am an ecologist, but I got my masters in evolutionary biology; after a gruleing insect-rearing experiment in my second semester, I decided that the lab aspect of evolution wasn't for me for day-to- day work, but I completely love reading evolutionary research. I'm also really interested in conservation even though none of my coursework or research is explicitly about conservation biology, and I like learning and thinking about how the ecology and conservation biology fields do or do not interface well with the social and strategic aspects of different conservation priorities.

CMM: What is your advice for other ECR folks interested in #365papers?

CJL: I'd really suggest the challenge to people starting a PhD. So many people I talk to have similar feelings about that stage where you are just absorbing background and reading and reading and reading: in some ways it's boring. Even if the science you are reading about isn't boring, the monotony is really tough and you don't get that feeling of DOING something. Maybe the #365papers approach could make it a little more fun and provide some structure. If you check off that one paper a day, you then have permission to do something else with some of the rest of your time, but you know you're still reading a lot of papers and not slacking off.

CMM: Thanks for this super-thoughtful reflection on #365papers — I’ve really enjoyed writing about reading with you!

Follow Chelsea on twitter: @ChelskiLittle 

Sex ≠ Gender

A guest post from Talia Young, Ph.D., David H. Smith Conservation Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton University & Director of Fishadelphia

I recently saw another ecology talk refer to “gender ratios” of fish. I’d like to talk about the difference between sex and gender, and why ecologists should care about this topic.  

DefinitionsThe words “sex” and “gender” are often used interchangeably in colloquial contexts, but they have different meanings that are relevant to our work in ecology.

“Sex” refers to categories based on a combination of biological and physical characteristics, such as body organs, chromosomes, and hormones (WHO 2011, APA 2015). Sex is commonly assigned on the basis of external genitalia at birth and is often assumed to be only male or female, but scientists have identified at least five different groupings of human sex chromosomes, anatomy, and hormone physiology (Fausto-Sterling 1993).  Other terms that relate to sex include intersex, freemartin, and hermaphrodite. (Note that hermaphrodite is a term currently used for animals but considered outdated and rude when used to describe humans; the preferred contemporary term for humans is intersex.)  (“Sex” can also refer to activity among one or more individuals that may or may not result in sexual arousal and/or genetic recombination. I’m not addressing this meaning of the word in this piece.)

“Gender” refers to identities and categories based on social or cultural characteristics (WHO 2011, APA 2015). Gender is both internal (gender identity, which is each person’s innate sense of their own gender), and external (gender expression, which is how each person expresses their gender identity). Woman, man, masculine, and feminine are all terms that can refer to gender. Transgender is a term used to describe a person whose gender identity is different from the sex they were assigned at birth. Gender is primarily a human and social term, and it is not usually relevant for non-human animals or plants.

When we observe biological and physical aspects of our study organisms, those observations tell us about the sex of those individuals, not the gender. When we interact with other humans, we usually know more about their gender rather than their sex: for example, we often know about their clothing and hairstyles but not very much about their body organs, chromosomes, or hormones.  (Furthermore, and this fact may be obvious, but clothing and hairstyles are not necessarily signifiers of any particular gender identity.)  Among humans, sex and gender may be related, but they are not equivalent. In other words, female and woman are often thought to be synonymous, but in reality, female refers to different characteristics than woman does. It also seems worth noting that both of these sets of categories (sex and gender) are imperfect systems that we have developed in an attempt to describe the world we live in.  As with all categorization systems (such as species, or developmental stages), the world is more complicated than our words can capture.

Usage

1. If (a) you work with plants or animals, and (b) you are interested in categories such as female and male, and (c) those categories are determined by biological or physical criteria (such as presence of sexual organs or gonads, sexually dimorphic coloring, or hormone levels), the accurate term to use is “sex,” not “gender.” See examples in Table 1.

1. If you (a) are talking about scientists and (b) interested in categories such as “women” and “men,” it’s more polite to use gender rather than sex categories. Why? In professional contexts, we may think we know what gender our colleagues present themselves as (e.g., women, men), but probably don’t know very much about the biological sex of our colleagues (e.g., chromosomes, body organs, hormones). It’s odd and inappropriate to make assumptions about other people’s bodies, especially in a professional context. See examples in Table 2. It’s also worth noting that it’s polite to ask people how they prefer to be described. For example, you might ask, “What are the best pronouns to use for you?”

Why is this language important?

1. Accuracy. As ecologists, we are a profession dedicated to describing our beautiful but chaotic and messy world with the best accuracy we can muster. Using language correctly and appropriately is one important part of that work. If you have ever made a distinction between a substantial and significant difference, or taught a student that a single data point is singular while data are collectively plural, the difference between “sex” and “gender” is just one more way to increase the accuracy of our language and our work.

2. Respect. Using gender rather than sex categories when talking about humans means that we do not make intrusive assumptions about other people’s bodies.

Take-homes

• Language matters. Using accurate language is important both in our work and in our community. Being careful with our language helps us improve the quality of our science and allows us to describe our world with greater accuracy. It also helps us build a considerate and thoughtful community of scientists.

• Improving the accuracy of our language is a lifelong process. None of us started out understanding the difference between a substantial and a significant change, or an individual’s sex and gender. But one of the gifts of being scientists is that we are constantly learning new things about our world. Doing so helps us become both better scientists and better people.

Questions?  Comments? I’d love to hear them. Email me at talia.young@princeton.edu. #sexvsgenderinecology

Acknowledgments

Thanks to K. Baker, H. Batson, S. Borrelle, N. EtShalom, Y. EtShalom, S. Fox, S. Kassabian, E. Kaufman, and C. McDonough MacKenzie for suggestions and improvements to this piece.  All errors are mine.

References

• World Health Organization, Gender Mainstreaming for Health Workers, 2011. https://www.who.int/gender-equity-rights/knowledge/glossary/en/

• APA dictionary of psychology (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association. (2015). https://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/sexuality-definitions.pdf

• Fausto-Sterling, A. 1993. “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are Not Enough.” The Sciences. https://www.fd.unl.pt/docentes_docs/ma/TPB_MA_5937.pdf

Other resources

• Krieger, N. 2003. Genders, sexes, and health: what are the connections—and why does it matter? International Journal of Epidemiology, 32(4), 652–7, https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyg156

• Fausto-Sterling A. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Banner image photo credits: Mimi Kessler and Don Young

Family and the Field

 Over the weekend I submitted a grant proposal, wrote a quippy tweet, and read a paper. The paper was Dr. Christopher Lynn’s ‘Family and the field: Expectations of a field- based research career affect researcher family planning decisions’, published last month in PLoS ONE. The tweet was:

At bedtime I told my three-year-old I had to stay up to submit a grant proposal.

Her: Just do it in the morning.

Me: I can’t, it’s due at midnight.

Her: Oh. I’m gonna do mine in the morning.

I bet she gets funded over me.

The grant was a proposal to do more field work away from my family. 

Though Dr. Lynn and his coauthors were focused on anthropology fieldwork, I found myself nodding along emphatically at each response to their survey of anthropologists. Ecology, like anthropology, has a long tradition of field-based careers, and high proportions of women in undergraduate and graduate programs which are not reflected in the gender breakdown of later career stages (though see this Dynamic Ecology post on recent tenure track hires).

Even as I’ve openly tweeted and blogged about it — you know my older kid is funny, you know I have a new baby — I’ve been reluctant to share much of my deeper experience as a parent in ecology. The gritty details are full of the tensions that Lynn captures in his paper. I’m nervous about how parenthood will impact my quest for a tenure track job, but I want to normalize academic parenthood for the students behind me. I want credit for the hard work that I’ve put into carving out this balance, but I know my experience is grounded in the intersections of incredible privilege.

At breakfast on Friday, while I enjoyed a latte served in a beer stein and my baby napped in the stroller and my partner covered our toddler’s preschool drop off, I told a friend that I didn’t know how to write this post. “So you want to have a baby in grad school? Just get an NSF grant that doesn’t exist anymore, then have a healthy infant who sleeps through the night, and have your partner use their paid parental leave to uproot their life and come into the field with you.” It’s disingenuous to package my experience as pithy advice. But Lynn’s paper provides a framework for talking about parenthood and fieldwork in an honest and meaningful way. 

The prominence of fieldwork in careers like anthropology and ecology reinforces stereotypes of lone practitioners who can afford to drop everything at home to spend weeks at a remote site totally immersed in gathering data. Lynn and his coauthors explain that this expectation “systematically overlooks the significant social and financial responsibilities experienced by many professionals and trainees, including dependent family members (children, elderly parents, etc.), and household expenses (rent, car payments, student loan bills, tuition, credit card bills), and may act to systematically privilege those without these pressures.”

Lynn surveyed nearly one thousand anthropologists to explore the relationships between fieldwork and family. My own experiences as an ecologist and mom mirrored so much of the results reported in this paper. Lynn’s work clearly identifies the privileges that enable parents like me to balance fieldwork and family — here, I reflect on how the anecdotes of my life align with the survey of anthropologists. The responses to Lynn’s survey were nearly evenly split between professionals and students; most identified as women (80%), and white (82%). Aside from my field, my background fits the profile of the typical anthropologist who filled out Lynn’s online survey. I’m a white woman, I’m married (like 72.5% of professional respondents) with 1+ children (67%), I was raised in and I live in North America (82.6%; 80.9%). I’m from an educationally privileged, high-status family; in other words, my parents both went to graduate school and I married a lawyer. 

“Regardless of gender or career stage, the majority of those with children (56%) indicated that parenthood did not impact their decision to pursue a career in anthropology.”

I think I fall into the 44%; I realized early on in parental leave that I was not cut out to be a stay-at-home parent. This was not a surprise — I had very much planned on finishing my PhD — but, I did not expect to miss science so much. The weeks that I spent at home with my first child — those long, monotonous, and lonely weeks — solidly reinforced my decision to pursue a career in ecology. Having kids also made me more hopeful, and more committed to applied conservation research so that I might contribute something towards improving the state of the world they would inherit. 

“Women were less likely to have conducted field-based research since having a child. When they did, women were dependent on support from their parents more than their male peers were…who were more dependent on spousal support…Support from family and academic peers has a significant impact on individual abilities to conduct extended stretches of fieldwork, the places where fieldwork can be conducted (safety, distance, etc.), and possibly the quality of the work that can be conducted, which echoes findings on family-career balance in academia in general.”

 As a PhD student, I spent six field seasons in Acadia National Park; I was pregnant during my fifth and my daughter joined me for my sixth. The next year, when she was almost two and no longer nursing, I left her behind for a two-week field course and then a two-month trip to my postdoc home campus, which included a week of fieldwork. When she was two and a half, I left her again for a week of fieldwork; her sister came with me though, because I was 11 weeks pregnant. Except for my most recent week of field work (Baxter), my postpartum fieldwork is based in a cushy tourist town (Bar Harbor). I’ve had decent cell phone service and ice cream shops with bougie flavors like blueberry sour cream crumble and Maine sea salt caramel. I started working in Acadia before I had kids — in fact compared to the rest of my lab, my field site was wild and remote — but the location of my dissertation work definitely made it easier to consider having kids while I was in graduate school. 

“Women and men used a variety of resources for childcare while in the field, though men tended to rely exclusively on a co-parent or combination of childcare options, whereas women more often utilized grandparents and non-relatives (p = .01). The majority of those who had taken their kids to the field reported it as a good experience for the children (87%), though half (51%) also reported that it made fieldwork more difficult.”

 My childcare while in the field spanned the gamut — my mom, my husband, a college kid that once upon a time had been my camper at summer camp when I was soccer counselor. We pieced together twelve weeks of childcare for my last dissertation field season in an effort that felt both shoestring and super-privileged. I think it was a good experience for my eight-month-old, mostly because it extended her breastfeeding and she loved eating. Among the challenges that I faced during my dissertation fieldwork, having my kid with me ranked well below a government shutdown closing my National Park, a government sequester closing access roads to my field site, and a controlled burn burning my control plots. I found being pregnant in the field more difficult than being a mom in the field: the heartburn, the achy ligaments, and the visibility were tough. As a mom in the field I carried my kid in a backpack a few times, but mostly I was out there on my own and it was refreshing to get away from the unfamiliar challenges of parenthood (where I often felt totally inept) and jump into the familiar challenges of fieldwork (where I often felt like my most capable self). When you are pregnant, it is much harder to compartmentalize fieldwork and family — you can’t leave the pregnancy symptoms at home. 

“Having a partner who is also in academia significantly increases stress, as do negative employment status and, curiously, planning not or being unsure about future children. Among students, being white was significantly associated with a positive sense of family-career balance, as was positive employment status. There was a significant relationship between a low career impact on family planning and a positive sense of family-career balance.”

 I don’t know if have a partner outside of academia has significantly decreased my stress. However, I do not find it curious that uncertainty about future children increases stress; in retrospect, I think I was more stressed in the years that we were thinking about kids, or trying to have a kid, than I am now with two children. It’s a huge decision to grow your family — and once you decide, you have so little control over the process. Trying to conceive while attending endless women-in-science panels full of audience questions about disapproving advisors and maternity gaps in CVs is a very unsettling experience. Finally, if I were confident that my decision to have children “early” had a low impact on my career, then I think I would have an extremely positive view of my family-career balance. The truth is, as a postdoc, I don’t yet know the impact on my career trajectory though I think that it’s worth noting the irony in my experience this summer when I was considered both early career and just months shy of being a geriatric prenatal patient. My self-assessed family-career balance is this: I’m too tired to think that I’m doing a bad job. If I am this tired, I must be getting sh*t done. 

“Family planning decisions of women were significantly more likely to be affected by concerns with conducting fieldwork, getting tenure, impacts on promotion, preconceived notions of peers, and disappointing their advisors than in men.”

 Step One: Paid parental leave for everyone.

I started thinking about this post after my tweet about post-bedtime grant writing went science-twitter-viral. A Syracuse PhD candidate replied “Your ‘Dr. Mom’ tweets keep me going.” The forward-facing social media projection of my ‘Dr. Mom’ life is built on a scaffolding of duct tape, socioeconomic privilege, and falling asleep as soon as the toddler is at preschool. There’s also the luck of landing at the right university (with paid parental leave for graduate students) and the right postdoc fellowship (the orientation featured a powerpoint of all the babies born to fellows during their time in the fellowship). I wasn’t specifically looking for family-friendly programs during my applications, but the visible examples of successful parents in my field allayed (most of) my fears about having one child, and then having a second.

The ‘Dr. Mom’ tweets are a part of this visibility, but they also obscure the daily grind of parenthood and the many, many toddler conversations that are way more frustrating and way less quotable. I’ve had every advantage in this game from socioeconomic status to health to living near extended family and it’s still scrape-me-off-the-floor-at-the-end-of-the-day hard. Lynn’s research on expectations of a field-based career provides this framework for parents like me to contextualize our experiences, recognize our privileges, and then work to make our fields more inclusive for all parents, professionals, and trainees. 

One last note: this is only the first paper from Lynn’s survey. I’m excited to see where this research goes as they “explore the role of ethnicity, status of first-generation college students in accessing an anthropological career, and how anthropology fares in supporting breastfeeding and maternal and paternal leave, among other workplace issues.”

Take Your Social Media to Work Day

Last July, my social media feeds were flooded with grey “I heart Science” tshirts — they were posed with coffee mugs, lab coats, field notebooks, computer monitors, standing alone with a dog or huddled around other science tshirts.

We were all sharing our #DayOfScience, posting twelve pictures over twelve hours as part of the Earth Science Women’s Network Science-a-thon. 

Recently I flipped back through my own tweets from that day, photos of me setting off on a run with my 20 lbs toddler in the jogging stroller, a stack of field guides arranged on a coffee shop table in preparation for an exploratory field site visit, a shot of myself and my PhD advisor at Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday party in Concord, Massachusetts. 

It’s been 14 months since the first Science-a-thon and it’s hard not to imagine the montage of where my career has taken me set to Green Day's ‘Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).’ I did the exploratory field site visit, and then, in March 2018, the grueling and amazingly awesome winter coring fieldwork in Baxter State Park. Since Thoreau’s 200th birthday, I — the prodigal grad student from our lab who eschewed Concord for Maine throughout my entire PhD career — coauthored a manuscript centered on some Thoreau data.

I miss pushing a 20-pounder in that jogging stroller, and not just because that kid is bigger now and demands to get out and run stretches of the Charles River with me. My running is on hiatus because that kid just became a big sister. I hung up my trailrunners before Labor Day weekend, and by mid-September my running tights had become my defacto uniform, though the sportsbras and race tshirts were replaced by nursing bras and burp cloths. The montage ends with me on the phone with the Science-a-thon founder Dr. Tracey Holloway.

“Think about what you’d do if you were taking your cousin, or teenager, or parent to work” this is her advice for Science-a-thon 2018. “You’d show them a normal day, but with a little extra fun, you’d give them a tour of the lab. If you think your day is boring, or not interesting, or if you are in meetings all day — not everyone imagines that a scientist’s day involves lots of meetings!”

Science-a-thon is next week — and the Day of Science has become the whole week of October 15-19 to celebrate the many faces of science. Science-a-thon hopes to counter the one-dimensional caricatures of scientists as white guys with white hair wearing lab coats in ivory towers. The visible faces of science in popular culture are pretty limited: over 80% of Americans can’t name a single living scientist. Holloway wants to highlight the diversity of scientists and showcase our excitement in science. She noted that she herself has good friends who have no idea what she does in the course of her day. When scientists are featured in the media, often the glossy, big picture issues overshadow the day-in-the-life experience of being a scientist. Science-a-thon is a chance to peel back the curtain on the mundane, to document the daily grind of science across a range of disciplines and career stages in what Holloway calls an “avalanche of experiences.”

The format of scientists posting 12 photos over 12 hours is meant to capture the humanity of scientists — our full day at the office, or lab, or research station, and what we do before and after work. One of the perks of blogging for PLOS is the ability to cold-call a scientist and ask, hey what is this thing that you’re doing? I asked Holloway about the origin story of the Science-a-thon, and how it supports the Earth Science Women’s Network (ESWN). First, she stresses the important point that Science-a-thon is not just for women and not just for earth scientists — everyone is encouraged to participate! In 2002, Holloway and some colleagues founded ESWN as a peer-mentoring network. They had zero budget — they couldn’t order pizza or reserve a room, which made it difficult to plan for the future. In 2014 ESWN became a nonprofit, which meant that now they needed to think about fundraising while also pursuing the mission of supporting scientists. When Holloway’s friend did a bike-a-thon for charity, a light bulb went off — we support our friends who bike and run and dance for non-profits not because we have ties to the organization, but because if they are willing to push themselves outside of their comfort zones, we trust that they are doing it for a worthy cause. So it follows that if your best friend or family member says, “ESWN is great! Help them support women in science!” you will trust their endorsement. Science-a-thon blends the watch-me-do-something-new-and-challenging and the help-me-support-a-cause-I-believe-in aspects of a bike-a-thon, no spandex required.

The scientists who participate in Science-a-thon can set up fundraising pages through crowdrise to support ESWN. This is the same platform that I used when I ran the Mount Desert Island Marathon as part of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society team. Except instead of shredding my quads on the hills outside Acadia National Park, I’m trying to train my outreach muscles. My alarmingly bright yellow MDI Historical Society race shirt matches (thematically, if not sartorially) my soft grey Science-a-thon tshirts. Last year, there was no registration fee, but all participants had to set up a crowdrise page. This year, fundraising is not required, though there’s a small registration fee to cover the cost of the event. I’m looking forward to next week’s Science-a-thon: it’s coinciding with a trip to Maine where I’ll visit my postdoc home institution, watch a labmate’s PhD defense, and attend a conference at a National Park. These will be my first big, postpartum “days of science” and I’m looking forward to seeing my community of scientists in person — and watching the wider community of science share their days through social media. I already love the daily grind of science, but I have some worries — will my day of science reach an audience beyond “science twitter”? and will my current days of science (I’m right now typing and rocking from a glider, my infant is napping, my tea is cold, my “office” is my messy living room) be of interest to anyone who is not my mom? 

Over the summer, FACETS published Scientists on Twitter: Preaching to the choir or singing from the rooftops? Dr. Isabelle M. Côtéa and Dr. Emily S. Darling analyzed the Twitter followers of faculty members in ecology and evolutionary biology. They wanted to know if twitter was providing real opportunities for science outreach — were scientists engaging with nonscientists? Or are scientists on twitter just tweeting to other scientists? The answer is both: on average, scientists comprise over 50% of the followers for scientists on twitter. But, there seems to be a tipping point — around 1000 followers — where the range of followers diversifies to include “research and educational organizations, media, members of the public with no stated association with science, and a small number of decision-makers.”

Science-a-thon covers both preaching to the choir and singing from the rooftops. The Day Of Science features social media heavy hitters and folks who only tweet for the day. It’s more formal and more contained than a hashtag movement, which can be more accessible for scientists who aren’t all in on twitter. Holloway's advice to be honest and show the "boring" parts of our days means that we get to see process of science reflected in our social media feeds: the false starts, the quirky equipment, the waiting, and maybe even the baby spit up. This representation matters both within our scientific community — I know that seeing other academic parents was hugely important for me as grad student — and across a broader audience — many of us are funded by taxpayers, and this transparency pushes back on the barriers between scientists and the public. Last year about 200 people participated; ESWN is expecting around 300 scientists to sign up through their website in 2018. These “tshirt-official” scientists will receive the ESWN goodie bag, though as the Science-a-thon rolls on over the week, Holloway expects many others to spontaneously join in the hashtag and share their day. And that is her favorite part — watching her twitter feed fill with science, “the diversity of experiences woven together like a tapestry” as the movement expands outside of the “official” event.

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! 

The Hidden Gems of Data Accessibility Statements

Sometimes the best part of reading a scientific paper is an unexpected moment of recognition — not in the science, but in the humanity of the scientists. It’s reassuring in a way to find small departures from the staid scientific formula: a note that falls outside of the expected syntax of Abstract-Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion. As an early career scientist who is very much in the middle of sculpting dissertation chapters into manuscripts, it’s nice to remember that the #365papers I read are the products of authors who, like me, struggled through revisions and goofed off with coauthors and found bleak humor in the dark moments. 

Ecology blogs, twitter, and the wider media also love noting the whimsical titles, funny (and serious) acknowledgements, memorable figures, and unique determinations of co-authorship order that have appeared in the pages of scientific journals.

I enjoy stumbling on these moments of levity in my TO READ file; last spring I procrastinated formatting my dissertation by avidly reading the Acknowledgements section of anyone I’d even vaguely overlapped with in my PhD program. One place I have not thought to look for serendipitous science humor: the Data Availability Statement. As it turns out, I have been missing an interesting story.

A recent PLOS ONE paper set out to analyze the Data Availability Statements of nearly 50,000 recent PLOS ONE papers. This may sound like a dull topic, but Lisa Federer and coauthors' work is surprisingly engaging, topical, and thought provoking. In March 2014 PLOS unveiled a data policy requiring Research Articles to include a Data Availability Statement providing readers with details on how to access the relevant data for each paper. But, as Federer et al point out “‘availability’ can be interpreted in ways that have vastly different practical outcomes in terms of who can access the data and how.” 

Why do Data Availability Statements matter? In ecology, open data advocates make the case for reproducibility and re-use. So many of us work on small study areas and amass isolated spreadsheets of data, and then publish on our system, maybe throwing a subset of the data we collected into a supplementary file. But big picture questions that look across scales, ecosystems, and approaches rely on big data — and big data is often an amalgam of many small datasets from a wide array of scientists. Small (or any size) datasets that are publicly available, and easy to access in data repositories instead of old lab notebooks or defunct lab computers, are much more likely to have legs, to get re-used and re-tested, and contribute to the field at large.

While PLOS was on the vanguard of Data Accessibility Statements among peer-reviewed journals, Federer’s review of the contents of these Data Availability Statements makes it clear that we are not yet in the shiny future of Open Data. PLOS’ Data Accessibility policy “strongly recommends” that data be deposited in a public repository; Federer found that only 18.2% of PLOS papers named a specific repository or source where data were available. Most Data Accessibility Statements direct the reader to the paper itself or supplementary information. Even among the data repository articles, some Data Accessibility Statements indicated a repository but failed to include a URL, DOI, or accession number — basically sending readers on a wild goose chase to locate their data within the repository. 

Other statements seem to have been entered as placeholders, potentially intended to be replaced upon publication of the article, such as “All raw data are available from the XXX [sic] database (accession number(s) XXX, XXX [sic])” or “The data and the full set of experimental instructions from this study can be found at <repository name>. [This link will be made publically [sic] accessible upon publication of this article.]” These two articles, published in 2016 and 2015, respectively, still contain this placeholder text as of this writing.

 These examples of placeholders that made it into publication are embarrassing, but human, and as Federer points out, Data Accessibility Statements should be reviewed by editors and peer reviewers with the same scrutiny that we apply to study design, statistical analyses, and citations. I have worked on meta-analyses and projects that depend on data from existing digital archives. The frustration of chasing down supplementary information, Dryad DOIs, and GitHub addresses only to find a dead end or a broken corresponding author email address is a feeling akin to discovering squirrels chewing through temperature logger wires halfway through the field season. Federer notes that the tide is turning towards open data: after a rocky start in 2014 — Federer’s team parsed many papers likely submitted before (but published after) the Data Availability policy went into effect — 2015 and 2016 saw the percent of papers that lacked a Data Availability Statement drop dramatically. Over the same time period, Federer notes slight increases in the number of statements referring to data in a repository and fewer that claim the data is in the paper or — shudder — available upon request.

At a broader level, open data is a newly politicized topic. The EPA recently proposed new standards that would ban scientific studies from informing regulatory purposes unless all the raw data was widely available in public and could be reproduced. This is not so much a gold standard as a gag rule.

In a PLOS editorial, John P. A. Ioannidis points out that while “making scientific data, methods, protocols, software, and scripts widely available is an exciting, worthy aspiration” in eliminating all but so-called perfect science from the regulatory process, the EPA is committing to making decisions that “depend uniquely on opinion and whim.” Most of the raw data from past studies are not publicly available — and as Federer’s research shows, even in an age of required Data Availability Statements, open data is still a work in progress. And so we beat on — scientists against anti-science Environmental Protection Agency administrators, borne back ceaselessly in support of publishing accessible, open data as a kind of green light to past research. 

References:

Federer LM, Belter CW, Joubert DJ, Livinski A, Lu Y-L, Snyders LN, et al. (2018) Data sharing in PLOS ONE: An analysis of Data Availability Statements. PLoS ONE 13(5): e0194768. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0194768 

Ioannidis JPA (2018) All science should inform policy and regulation. PLoS Med 15(5): e1002576. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002576 

Academia & Parenthood: Advocating for Child-friendly Conferences

I’m currently navigating the stormy and under-charted academic conference-childcare seas. My daughter hasn’t attended an academic conference since she was an infant. During our parental leave, my (non-academic) partner and I banged out two trips to Maine for regional meetings, but in the two and half years since, I’ve been traveling, presenting, and poster-ing solo. In that first year, I schlepped my breast pump across conference centers and through TSA lines. Now, I leave room in my bag for tiny t-shirts and kid-friendly swag. Next month, my kid will come with me to my MS alma mater for a conference in my old grad school home. 

The “childcare-conference conundrum” — how can parents balance conference attendance and childcare and how can conferences accommodate these (mostly) early-career scientist-parents— is widespread in academia, but these discussions seemed to be relegated to a whisper network of moms-mentoring-moms. When I first searched for advice on conferencing-with-a-baby/parenting-with-a-career, it was mostly through informal channels. There were conversations at women-in-science events and panels, tips traded through twitter, and hard-won insights passed from lab to lab.

This month, PNAS published Rebecca M. Calisi and a Working Group of Mothers in Science’s ‘How to tackle the childcare-conference conundrum.’ In this piece, Calisi and coauthors clearly define the challenges of parenting while pursuing a career in science and outline four concrete suggestions for conferences to better support academic parents. They write:

“Using [these] guidelines also helps normalize pregnancy, lactation, and the childcare needs of working parents, especially working mothers. These guidelines may seem burdensome to conference organizers; however, they entail considerations that parents take into account every day while maintaining an active career.”

This Working Group of Mothers in Science opinion piece is simple, clear, and groundbreaking. This is a departure from the model of moms-mentoring-moms — it is an outward-facing, policy-ready call to action for institutional changes. The moms-mentoring-moms model can be great for individuals, but it does not address the structural inequalities facing parents in academia. Instead, the forty-five co-authors write: “These recommendations are directed toward research societies and conference organizers who are willing to take a leadership role in creating solutions, either incrementally or on a large scale.”

The recommendations are packaged in a memorable acronym, CARE: Childcare, Accommodate families, Resources, and Establish social networks. Each recommendation is outlined in detail, from the physiological needs behind specific accommodations (for example, how baby-wearing, on-site childcare, and lactation rooms to support breastfeeding parents) to a range of possible policies and actions for conference organizers to adopt. In my own experience, this year I’m attending an intimate one-day science symposium at my field site, medium-sized weekend regional meetings, and a huge week-long international conference. There are CARE recommendations that could improve every one of these conferences.

I plan to share this PNAS paper with the conference organizers next month when I arrive to give two talks with my two year old in tow. Part of the appeal of bringing my child to this conference is the opportunity to return to my old grad school and share my whole self — the scientist & the parent that I’ve become — with my old colleagues, grad cohort, and mentors. Earlier this month, I chatted with PLoS Ecology Community Editor Jeff Atkins on his podcast Major Revisions. We talked about academic parenthood, kid field assistants, and my dramatic balance (see-saw?) of family and career as a postdoc. I spent a lot of the last year as an absent academic parent while I traveled for research, training, conferences, and longs stay at my “home” institution, a university that’s actually a four-hour drive from my “home” home. Throughout this stretch, I’ve received amazing moms-mentoring-moms mentorship, wonderful childcare and co-parenting, and enthusiastic support from all professional corners. A combination of luck and privilege has buoyed my scientist-parenthood journey. What Calisi’s CARE recommendations do is provide this kind of support with equity and inclusiveness to all parents at academic conferences. What I need — what my peers in the early-career parenthood cohort, and the grad students coming up behind us need — is not more stories about having-it-all, work-life balance anecdotes, or advice on how individuals can adjust to parenthood in academia. We need the CARE recommendations, we need institutional support, and we need these to continue to be published in high-impact journals in our field like PNAS. 

Finally, I should disclose that I’m writing about ‘How to tackle the childcare-conference conundrum’ while lounging in my hotel room 1300 miles away from my kid. I’m visiting the National Lacustrine Core Facility with samples I cored from my ponds in Maine. My kid is old enough to FaceTime, my breast pump is gathering dust in storage, traveling is much easier on both of us at this point, and I am determined to enjoy it. For me, enjoying the travel means immersing myself in college basketball from my hotel bed, and uninterrupted evening manuscript revisions that run right through toddler bedtime. One of the benefits of the support system outlined in ‘How to tackle the childcare-conference conundrum’ is the ability to decide to travel without children. This option is often not a choice but a necessity, and if I had waited until it was easy to travel without my child, I would have missed out on at least a year and a half of research, training, and conference opportunities. My cushy visiting-researcher-in-a-hotel-life now is possible (and mommy-guilt-free) because people like a Working Group of Mothers in Science have advocated and worked to shift the culture of academia. Now, we have the CARE roadmap to shift the policies and culture at our conferences. So, with gratitude and nine uninterrupted hours of sleep, I salute the amazing work of Calisi and Working Group of Mothers in Science! 

Graphic Novels & Socio-Ecological Systems

Let’s say you’ve just pulled off an innovative, interdisciplinary symposia bringing together stakeholders across socio-ecological systems in the world’s oceans. You spent a week in France with 230 ecologists, social scientists, economists, modellers, and lawyers collaborating on solutions for managing and protecting marine ecosystems. Now, how do you get the broader scientific community to read your symposium report? 

If you were clever enough to invite a professional cartoonist to the symposia, you pull together pages of fun, dynamic sketches and publish a graphic novel in the ICES Journal of Marine Science.

This is the amazing — and fun! — trick that Dr. Olivier Thébaud and Dr. Jason Link accomplished after MSEAS 2016. ‘Managing marine socio-ecological systems: picturing the future’ is a graphic novel illustrated by Bas Kohler that was published alongside Dr. Link’s traditional overview of the MSEAS 2016 Symposium. The illustrations are amazing — they pack in energy and dialogue with playful humor across an incredible range of serious, challenging subjects.

The backstory of this graphic novel contains a lesson in interdisciplinary communication. The science steering committee for MSEAS 2016 invested serious planning time into the social side of their symposium. Dr. Thébaud writes:

The idea of inviting Bas Kohler at MSEAS was initially aimed at increasing interaction between participants during the meeting, as we were bringing together folks from different disciplinary networks which do not usually meet.

Dr. Link and other steering committee members were skeptical, but MSEAS brought in cartoonist Bas Kohler through funding dedicated to the social and cultural side of the event. After Day 1, everyone at MSEAS was hooked. As Dr. Link remembers, “Kohler’s beautiful illustrations just got to the core of your talk. In fact, there was a lot of negative feedback from the day without Bas. He was wanted at every session!” After MSEAS 2016 Dr. Link says he “drew the short straw” to write the normal, boring report. But, “no one reads the boring report. We wanted to do something unique. This was a conference about social and human systems and we wanted to capture that in a different medium.” So, Dr. Link brainstormed an outline for a cartoon report. He wanted to tell a story about the state of the discipline, the meeting itself, and future directions for scientists and stakeholders. The MSEAS team looked through Kohler’s illustrations from the symposium to create the graphic novel around this outline. Dr. Link did write a straightforward report — it's published in the same issue of ICES Journal of Marine Science — but he also pitched the graphic novel to an editor at the journal. This was not a terribly risky pitch since Link was friends with the editor, but as far as he knows it is the first graphic novel published in a peer reviewed journal.

We talked a little bit about the intersection of art and science. There are many artists engaged in science communication, through most of their work is facing out towards the general public. In this case with a graphic novel in a journal*, MSEAS has Bas Kohler’s work facing inward, toward the scientific community. Link is hopeful that this “paper” will inspire other conference organizers to consider bringing artists to their symposia. He encourages others to carve out a small fraction of the conference budget, explore local artists, and ask how do we want to capture our story? “Just have it on the list,” he says. He’s following his own advice, currently working on another symposia steering committee and exploring this option again. “A lot of us have been in this game for awhile — we need to mix it up and keep it fresh.” Happy reading!

Reference:

Thébaud, Olivier, Jason S. Link, Bas Kohler, Marloes Kraan, Romain López, Jan Jaap Poos, Jörn O. Schmidt, David C. Smith, and Handling editor: Howard Browman. "Managing marine socio-ecological systems: picturing the future." ICES Journal of Marine Science 74, no. 7 (2017): 1965-1980.  

*The graphic novel & MSEAS report are open access and thus available to the general public, but still, deciding to publish in a journal is by definition looking for niche audience.

Conservations Genetics, Non-academic Coauthors & Erdős Numbers

I spent a week in Washington DC about two weeks before the government shutdown. Part of my conservation science postdoc fellowship involves professional development retreats and this winter we were in DC for policy training. Over three days, panels of government scientists, NGO staff, and legislative staffers repeated this message: publishing peer-reviewed papers is not enough to impact policy. I remember sitting at the bar one evening and lamenting the standard “these results suggest conservation managers should…” sentence near the end of each of my dissertation chapters.

As early-career scientists, we all felt a little stuck — what could we do to make our research more policy-relevant and accessible? Well, for one, we could write papers with non-academic coauthors. 

A recent study in Biological Conservation reports that papers with non-academic coauthors better link conservation genetics and genomics research to policy and conservation outcomes. Britt et al. assert that conservation genetics faces an application crisis: while many peer-reviewed publications tout the importance of conservation genetics, there has been limited integration of genetic data into management. Dr. Aaron Shafer at Trent University speculated that this “conservation genetics gap” was not a case of managers lacking access to expertise and funding, but driven instead by academics under pressure to publish who were framing genetic studies in conservation buzzwords. He thought the swell of conservation genetics in the literature might not match the needs of managers on the ground — thus, managers reading the peer-reviewed lit would be unlikely to find relevant conservation genetics research, and instead focus limited resources on old school methods like radio-collaring. Shafer shared this hunch with an undergrad and she hit the ground running — lead author Meghan Britt led a meta-analysis of conservation genetic and genomic studies to uncover the causes behind the conservation research-implementation gap. 

Britt and Shafer’s paper, ‘The importance of non-academic coauthors in bridging the conservation genetics gap,’ found three thought-provoking trends after reviewing 300 publications. First, the majority of these papers were focused on “species of low conservation concern or species yet to be assessed.” So, conservation genetics was often centered on species that were not top priorities according the IUCN RedList or NatureServe. Second, less than 40% of the papers contained specific conservation recommendations. They write, “an article was ranked as having a specific conservation recommendation if there was a clear course of action suggested, stated implementation methods, or policy changes that were advocated for.” The generic “we propose maintaining genetic diversity of the species to ensure long-term viability” did not count: there’s no clear or readily transferable application. Finally, a non-academic coauthor was associated with a 2.5-fold increase in the odds of a publication making a specific recommendation. Basically, non-academic coauthors seem to bring a heightened understanding of policy and on-the-ground needs to conservation genetics projects, and the result is a more management-forward paper. 

I’m not a geneticist, so I asked Shafer, isn’t this just good practice for conservation research in general? Shouldn’t we all seek out non-academic collaborations if we want our research to have real-world applications? His answer: Yes!

“We try to get out of the bubble, but it’s hard. We need to make that effort. We don't know the regulations and laws. There are people that understand these organisms on the ground, stakeholders who live with these animals. We think that we are always the knowledge providers, but really it is a two-way street.”

 Shafer has a long history of working with Alaska Fish and Game, dedicating many years to building good relationships with researchers and managers. I asked if these collaborations might also alleviate another side of the conservation genetics-implementation gap by increasing managers’ access to expertise and funding. He sees a lot of benefits for management in these partnerships: “Arguably we have more freedom on the academic side to try different protocols, whereas it's more rigid for management, and our flexibility can help bridge this. But, to have real world impact it needs to be guided by the managers.” He noted that academics often wear blinders to the on-the-ground needs of managers or the policy implications of their work. “In academia we can have samples in the freezer and yet we’ve never seen that animal in the wild.” We often think of the “gap” in conservation implementation as a fault of managers and policy-makers not listening to the science, but it is unrealistic and out of touch to see the gap is as a part of a linear model of conservation scientists delivering the empirical solutions.* 

Finally this paper made me think about Erdős numbers. In academia, a person’s Erdős number is a Kevin-Bacon-like metric of the “collaborative distance” between themselves and prolific mathematician Paul Erdős. Instead of counting the number of co-stars between yourself and Kevin Bacon, you count the number of coauthors between yourself and Paul Erdős. Stephen Heard recently blogged a bit about his absurdly low Erdős number. Since Heard is an ecologist, and Erdős was a mathematician, this low number shows the cross-disciplinary reach of their work. But, Britt’s paper led me to wonder if conservation scientists need a new Erdős number. What if we scored our collaborations outside of academia, or thought of a clever name for collecting coauthors from different agencies, from different levels of government, or from a range of NGOs? What if we celebrated these partnerships with the same cute, tongue-in-cheek competition that we do for Erdős numbers? I wrote one paper with an NGO during my master’s and my dissertation committee includes a National Park Service employee, so I think my “Britt Number” is a solid 2. 

Reference:

Britt, M., Haworth, S.E., Johnson, J.B., Martchenko, D. and Shafer, A.B., 2018. The importance of non-academic coauthors in bridging the conservation genetics gap. Biological Conservation, 218, pp.118-123. 

*For more on how to conceptualize the space between conservation research and implementation, I recommend Toomey et al.'s paper 'Navigating the Space between Research and Implementation in Conservation' in Conservation Letters. Britt et al. consistently describe the 'conservation genetics implementation gap' but Toomey has me now questioning is this a gap? what is a gap? which is kind of a weird but rewarding rabbit hole. 

525,600 minutes, 365 papers, and 100 articles every ecologist should read

Last month, Nature Ecology & Evolution published Courchamp and Bradshaw’s ‘100 articles every ecologist should read.’ Here, Courchamp and Bradshaw attempt to compile a list of seminal papers as a foundational reading list for ecology students. To this end, they enlist the help of editorial members of a selection of ecology journals to nominate and rank papers that "each postgraduate student in ecology—regardless of their particular topic—should read by the time they finish their dissertation... [and] any ecologist should also probably read." 

Ultimately, Courchamp and Bradshaw created a list that skews heavily male through a methodology that seems designed to avoid engaging in deep reflection on unconscious bias. Many ecologists have voiced their disappointment with the list; on twitter Kelly Ramirez and Terry McGlynn started collecting nominations of favorite female-authored papers for an inclusive list of 100 articles every ecologist should read. 

Four of the best papers that I read in 2017 were responses to Courchamp and Bradshaw: Bruna's “Editorial board members are a non-random sample of ecological experts”

Editors are indeed experts, but very few of the world’s experts are editors. Until Courchamp & Bradshaw’s survey is repeated with demographically and geographically distinct populations of qualified scientists, the extent to which the list of must-read papers they report reflects the consensus of the ecological community remains an open question.

 Baum & Martin's “It is time to overcome unconscious bias in ecology”

Rather than developing a representative and inspiring list of papers for young ecologists, Courchamp & Bradshaw have presented a highly gender and racially biased list in which 97 of 100 selected articles are first-authored by white men.

 Gilbert's “Can 100 must-read papers also reflect ‘who’ is ecology?”

Robert May (ten papers), Robert MacArthur (eight) and David Tilman (eight) each had more articles in the list than all female ecologists combined.

 Rameriz et al.'s “The future of ecology is collaborative, inclusive and deconstructs biases”

The list continues a long-standing tradition of highlighting almost exclusively work from male scientists and perpetuates a false perception that women, people of colour and people from the Global South are new to the field of ecology. In addition, the list is restrictive in classifying what ecology is, and is not.

 These four letters to the editor at Nature Ecology & Evolution capture and articulate the most important critiques of Courchamp and Bradshaw’s list. But, I think that this one paper and its list of one hundred papers that every ecologist should read begs one more question: What does it mean to read a paper? Courchamp and Bradshaw note that we are reading more papers than before (supposedly 468 papers per year for the average science faculty member in 2012), and more efficiently (average time spent reading has decreased by one-third). They explain that we are able to keep up with this Seussian treadmill of reading more faster through strategies like ‘flick-bouncing.’ But, somehow, despite all their best flick-bouncing, the journal editorial members that voted on the 100 seminal papers ranked articles that they had not read: they marked each paper as ‘“Read it”, “Know it” or “Don’t know it”. The result: “the ranked list of articles differed substantially depending on the stringent criterion of the respondents having actually read them. Overall, only 23% of the 100 top-ranked papers in the all-article list were also in the top 100 of the read-only list. A remarkable example is the top-ranked paper in the all-article list, which is entirely absent in the read-only top 100 (in fact, it was in 325th place in the latter ranking).” 

So, what does it mean to read a paper? Is it sufficient to flick-bounce these 100 must-read papers? (Apparently it’s sufficient to not read them at all, if we go by the voters’ recommendations.) I argue for slow reading — not Courchamp and Bradshaw’s list necessarily, but in general and across a more diverse reading list. Slow reading has become one of my favorite academic activities, and a practice I will forever associate with new parenthood. As I was preparing to return to my dissertation research at the end of my maternity leave, I stumbled on a series of blog posts about #365papers. It was late December 2015, and many of my academic heroes were reflecting on a year in which they had challenged themselves to read a paper a day. In 2015 I was decidedly not on top of the literature: that year I had navigated committee meetings & pregnant fieldwork, presented my research at 35 weeks pregnant and with an eight-week-old baby, I had learned how to install a carseat, but I had not kept up with reading papers. But, I was inspired by the lists, the #365papers hashtag, and the honesty in the recaps. Anne Jefferson's post especially resonated with me: she wrote of her experience reading with a newborn and I thought I could do that. Meghan Duffy at Dynamic Ecology wrote about how she defined a #365papers paper: 

Overall, I read 181 “papers” – though what to count was not always clear. I counted only papers that I read thoroughly and completely – say, at the level that I read something for a lab meeting. This meant that a lot of things that I read didn’t get counted, because I didn’t read the whole thing or only skimmed parts of it. I decided to count manuscripts and grant proposals that I was reviewing, as well as individual chapters of books and dissertations.

 The thorough and complete requirement intrigued me — I had spent my first few years in graduate school perfecting the art of the skim. I often read an abstract, the opening paragraphs of the introduction or discussion, and some figure captions, and then considered myself prepared for class discussion. I didn’t really do deep dives, especially in papers that weren’t directly related to my research. But I liked the idea, as Josh Drew wrote, that this resolution would give “me an excuse to read papers that were outside of my field.” So, I began #365papers in 2016.

In those early exhausting months of parenthood, I could at the very least read one paper each day and feel like I had accomplished something academic. I may have spilled every ounce of milk I pumped, I may have fallen asleep at my desk at office hours, I may have posted the wrong grading rubric for my class, or applied for a field permit for the wrong GPS coordinates, but I was reading! Reading slowly in 2016, I worked my way through the literature behind four chapters of my dissertation and two sets of revisions on my first paper. I re-read the papers that were the cornerstones of my fieldwork methods, I set up google scholar alerts on my field site, I pulled out my copy of Foundations of Ecology, I collected recommendations from folks on twitter, I identified which journals I consistently turned to and started systematically scouring their tables of contents. I came out of the experience with a deeper appreciation for good writing. My reviewing and writing skills improved as I gained confidence in my expertise in both ecology and syntax.

In 2016, I averaged a paper a day for eleven months — I took a break in October — and I loved it. I’ve been less consistent in 2017, but I jumped back into #365papers this October and I’m ending the year on a solid three-month streak. I still skim abstracts (though often those papers end up in my To-Read list for #365papers) and I engage in my share of flick-bouncing. But the papers that shape my thinking — the ones that spark new ideas & stick in my brain for weeks — are slow reads.

As a freshly-minted ecology PhD, I’m not convinced that we need a single list of ‘must-read’ papers. I think instead we need to learn how to read slowly, to build our own systems for collecting pdfs and organizing our stacks of papers, to practice carving out time in our busy days to dig into the literature and think deeply. My favorite slow reads of the year:

• The four letters to the editor in response to Courchamp & Bradshaw.

• Kueppers et al. 2017. Warming and provenance limit tree recruitment across and beyond the elevation range of subalpine forest. Global Change Biology.

• Hudson et al. 2017. Phenoseasonal subcanopy light dynamics & the effects of light on the physiological ecology of common understory shrub, L benzoin. PLOS ONE.

• Frederickson, ME. 2017. Mutualism are not on the verge of breakdown. Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

• Ogilvie, et al. 2017. Interannual bumble bee abundance is driven by indirect climate effects on floral resource phenology. Ecology Letters.

• Toomey, Knight & Barlow. 2017. Navigating the space between research and implementation in conservation. Conservation Letters.

• Nelson et al. 2017. Signaling Safety: Characterizing Fieldwork Experiences and Their Implications for Career Trajectories. American Anthropologist.

• Rabinowitz D. 1981. Seven forms of rarity. In The Biological Aspects of Rare Plants Conservation.

• Graae et al. 2017. Stay or go — how topographic complexity influences alpine plant population and community responses to climate change. Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics.

And one more recommendation — it’s not related to scientific literature at all, but I titled this blog post so I could link to David Rakoff’s radio essay on Rent. He felt as salty about Rent as I feel about '100 articles every ecologist should read'.Here’s to the 525,600 minutes awaiting us in 2018 — to daylights, sunsets, midnights, cups of coffee and 365 papers next year.