An ornithologist and an entomologist go into the kīpuka...

There is something magical about reading a well-written, remarkable paper from outside of your sub-discipline — the echoes of familiarity in methodology, the unpredictable overlaps, the serendipity of finding the research in the first place.

I recently found this magic in Vertical foraging shifts in Hawaiian forest birds in response to invasive rat removal, published in PLoS ONE in September 2018. Co-first-authors Dr. Erin E. Wilson Rankin and Dr. Jessie L. Knowlton transported me to the northeast slope of Mauna Loa Volcano for a bird-watching and bug-counting adventure through a network of half rat-eradicated kīpuka — a jigsaw puzzle of fragmented forest pieces dissected by lava flows. 

By most measures, I should never have read this paper. It came out while I was staggering though the first weeks of parental leave last fall. My invasive species are plants (not rats); there’s really no vertical space available (the trees are too short!) for shifts in arthropods or their predators in my plant communities at treeline; my island study site (downeast Maine) hasn’t seen volcanic activity for hundreds of millions of years (Hawaii’s kīpuka are created when volcanic lava flows move through native forests). For reasons I can’t explain, earlier this month I clicked on a link to The Wildlife Society’s — a society I’m not a part of and don’t actually follow on social media — Wildlife Publication Awards 2019 shortlist announcement. At the end of the Journal Paper category, this Hawaii study caught my eye, because I’m planning a trip there in the fall and recently spent three early morning hours driving through Iowa and Minnesota with my friend who is a postdoc at the University of Hawaii, Hilo.

Despite the winding the path to get this paper into my To Read Folder, there was a straight line from my final scroll through the Conclusions to the “compose” button on my email. I had to hear more from Drs. Wilson Rankin and Knowlton.

Here is what my initial google searches turned up: stunning photographs of kīpuka; and the discovery that the two first authors, now faculty at UC Riverside and Wheaton College, were postdocs on this project who first came to the kīpuka from the subfields of entomology (Dr. Wilson Rankin) and ornithology (Dr. Knowlton) back in 2011. The invasive rat removal efforts in their paper was a part of a larger study: 16 kīpuka fragments were methodically outfitted with trapping grids and compared to another 18 kīpuka without rat traps. “The larger study has examined how impacts by invasive predators (rats) change across a gradient of ecosystem size,” Wilson Rankin and Knowlton explained to me. “The kīpuka are a patchwork of forest fragments that were created when volcanic lava flows moved through native forests. The result is a landscape dotted with naturally fragmented forest patches that range in size from very small (<0.1 ha) to very large (>12 ha). This study system allowed us to tease apart the effects of invasive rats and the effects of ecosystem (or forest patch size) in order to better understand the forces that shape communities.” 

I asked how an entomologist and an ornithologist from different universities on the US mainland ended up working together in Hawaii. “The kīpuka project was a highly collaborative project among PIs at Stanford University, University of Maryland, Michigan Tech, and the US Forest Service that integrated multiple research fields to examine the effects of an invader on native communities.” They confirmed what google had hinted about their origin story. “We both joined this project early on as post-docs, one focusing on quantifying invasion impacts on the arthropod communities and the other focusing on the responses of native forest birds. By bringing together a research team with diverse backgrounds and expertise, the kīpuka project was able to develop a broad and in-depth understanding of how rats shape the invaded communities and alter the interactions among native species.” They ultimately found that the presence of invasive rats altered the foraging behavior of native birds — in rat-filled fragments the birds foraged higher in the canopy. The rats are not found above 6 m in the forest, but they seem to control the arthropod biomass below 6 m, suppressing the resources available for birds, especially insectivores and frugivores. In sites without rats, there was more arthropod biomass below 6 m and birds foraged at lower mean heights compared to higher foraging heights in control kīpuka.

These kīpuka are like the matryoshka dolls of island biogeography, a model system in a model system. The forest fragments are islands of habitat, and these in turn are contained within the island of Hawai‘i. I asked Wilson Rankin and Knowlton what they hoped managers in other systems could learn from this work. They write, “The fact that the kīpuka are fragments of habitat within a less hospitable matrix makes them comparable to other fragmented systems, which, as we all know, are increasingly common as human development continues to expand through natural habitats.” The kīpuka islands within islands system is special, but can still contribute to our understanding about invasive species in general. “While Hawaii is unique because of its high number of endemic species and long isolation from mammalian predators, many fragmented habitats are having to contend with extinctions of native species and invasions of nonnative species, even on the mainland. Our work shows that these invaders can alter whole trophic systems, either directly or via shifts in species’ behavior. This work helps to highlight the importance of considering the synergistic and sometimes unpredictable effects that habitat fragmentation and invasive species together can have on native food webs. We hope that both factors will be taken into account when planning restoration or conservation actions.” 

Finally, I just loved the opportunity to write about two women in STEM and their postdoc work. And I told Wilson Rankin and Knowlton that I appreciated reading a new paper covering fieldwork that concluded six years ago. My own dissertation researchfrom 2011-2013ish just reaching publication now too. As they write, “Patience and persistence are the two key words when it comes to getting your research published.” Wilson Rankin and Knowlton shared this reflection on the triumphs and low points of the journey from fieldwork to award-winning publication: “We both came onto this project as postdocs, and supervised the data collection for the three years of field research. After that we both went on to other positions, and thus had to balance writing up manuscripts from this research with the demands of new positions. Once submitted, this manuscript went through the revision process, which took some time but we are all pleased with the end product. In general, our advice to others would be to not be discouraged during the review process or its pace, as you can always improve a manuscript and the reviews are meant to help you improve your work.”

Somehow, this magical paper also brought some timely advice into my email inbox as I head into a summer of writing up first drafts of my own postdoc papers. I welcome this nice reminder to keep grinding, and to keep working with some of my fabulous peer-collaborators as they embark on new adventures and new jobs in the coming years. And of course, I am now more excited than ever to spend some time in Hawaii with conservation researchers this fall!

Reference:

Wilson Rankin EE, Knowlton JL, Gruner DS, Flaspohler DJ, Giardina CP, Leopold DR, et al. (2018) Vertical foraging shifts in Hawaiian forest birds in response to invasive rat removal. PLoS ONE 13(9): e0202869. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202869 

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 

Summer Reading (Part 1)

We’re rushing out of the dog days of summer and into the start of a new semester — or in my case the start of parental leave, which is a little bit like embarking on a new semester at an unknown campus and while I completed the newborn syllabus three years ago, I have this sinking feeling that I don’t even know which classes I’m enrolled in yet. Regardless, I’m reflecting on my summer reading.

Over June, July, and August, I was all in on #365papers and I have a top ten list of scientific papers from these long summer days of slow reading. Because my “semester” might start at any moment, I’m breaking this post into two parts. First up: my favorite hot-off-the-press summer reads on mountains and phenology.

On Mountains

Think globally & way into the past…

1. Iglesias, V., Whitlock, C., Krause, T.R., Baker, R.G., 2018. Past vegetation dynamics in the Yellowstone region highlight the vulnerability of mountain systems to climate change. Journal of Biogeography 45, 1768–1780. doi:10.1111/jbi.13364

Fifteen pollen records covering 16,000 years and the 80,000 km2 mountainous Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem create an incredible review of elevational patterns of vegetation change in an iconic mountainous region. In this paper, Dr. Virginia Iglesias lays out the challenges of quanitifying pollen-vegetation relationships in mountain regions (aka what I didn’t know when I proposed my postdoc research) and then pulls in a staggering amount of modern and fossil pollen data to recreate the history of Yellowstone’s dominant conifers. These are stories of both stability and rapid change through past climatic changes with conservation implications for managers facing anthropogenic climate change. My favorite line: “The current vegetation distribution is, at best, a short and rather anomalous baseline for evaluating ecological responses to future climate change.” 

2. Elsen, P.R., Monahan, W.B., Merenlender, A.M., 2018. Global patterns of protection of elevational gradients in mountain ranges. PNAS 115, 6004–6009. doi:10.1073/pnas.1720141115

This study has it all: mountain biodiversity love, protected area planning, big data analysis, and beautifully designed maps of “elevational protection” across the globe. Full disclosure: Dr. Paul Elsen is a fellow Smith Fellow and I also got to see this paper as a speed talk at the North American Congress for Conservation Biology in July. The bottom line is this: when you zoom out, most of the world’s mountain ranges are narrowly protected — we need conservation across elevation gradients to effectively protect species under climate change. 

On Phenology 

Wherever you get your phenology data (maybe from TV?) scientists are asking some really interesting questions about community composition, temporal dynamics, and the implications of climate change on interspecific relationships…

3. Carter, S.K., Saenz, D., Rudolf, V.H.W., 2018. Shifts in phenological distributions reshape interaction potential in natural communities. Ecology Letters 30, 133–9. doi:10.1111/ele.13081

Amphibian breeding phenology is not the kind of phenology that I study — I don’t install recorders at ponds to capture EPs of overnight breeding calls, I don’t log hours listening to the audio to identify twelve different amphibian species and record the number of individuals per species calling during each recording session, and I certainly have not done this tirelessly for fifteen years. But I’m so glad that Dr. Shannon Carter and her colleagues did because their ingenuous analysis of changes in the timing of calling between pairs of amphibian species has huge implications for how we — plant phenology people included! — study phenological mismatch. The overlap (or "phenological distributions") of amphibian breeding calls has shifted in weird and non-uniform ways, and metrics like ‘first day of calling’ or ‘median call date’ don’t capture these changes well. This is just a great analysis of a grinder ball dataset (8 ponds in Northeast Texas, monitored consistently over 15 years) which opens up a window to these big questions — How do we monitor phenology? What information do we need to know that temporal mismatch is occurring?

4. De Frenne, P., Van Langenhove, L., Van Driessche, A., Bertrand, C., Verheyen, K., Vangansbeke, P., 2018. Using archived television video footage to quantify phenology responses to climate change. Methods Ecol Evol 149, 1791–9. doi:10.1111/2041-210X.13024

Dr. Pieter De Frenne and his coauthors have received tons of press coverage (best sub-headline: "ignore the lycra—look at the flowers") for this incredibly photogenic work. They basically watched 200 hours of TV (old coverage of the Tour of Flanders), justified this as “research” by grabbing screen shots of 46 shrubs and trees from along the cycling course, and found surprisingly strong advances in the timing of spring leaf out and flowering in these plants over the years. This is, on one level, the opposite of Carter et al listening to frog calls for fifteen years — the phenology monitoring here is opportunistic and there is only a single metric each year (what was happening on the day they filmed the Tour). But as De Frenne points out at the end of the paper: “Probably the most promising way forward for phenology research is to better integrate all types of phenology data…observational time series, experimental manipulations of climate, herbarium records, historical surveys of vegetation, historical maps, repeat photographs and other, yet unexploited, sources such as television video footage from broadcast archives.” 

5. Winkler, D.E., Butz, R.J., Germino, M.J., Reinhardt, K., Kueppers, L.M., 2018. Snowmelt Timing Regulates Community Composition, Phenology, and Physiological Performance of Alpine Plants. Front. Plant Sci. 9, 631–13. doi:10.3389/fpls.2018.01140 

Dr. Daniel Winkler, PLoS ESA Reporting Fellow 2016, tweeted out his new paper in July and he had me at “community composition, phenology, and physiological performance of alpine plants.” My “alpine-ish” communities include true alpine on Katahdin, but also Cadillac Mountain in Acadia, which is a whopping 1,530’ and more accurately described as ‘Northern Appalachian-Acadian Rocky Heath Outcrop’ by NatureServe. I’m definitely interested in the differences between alpine-restricted species and wide-ranging species. Winkler’s team recorded species diversity, flowering phenology, and physiological measurements including gas exchange, net CO2 assimilation, and stomatal conductance across plots along an elevation and aspect gradient in the Colorado Rockies. Two results jumped out at me: the alpine-specialists displayed less flexible flowering phenologies than the wide-ranging species, but there were not strong differences between these groups in physiology. This is the kind of paper that inspires mad grant writing — I'm interested but skeptical, will this hold up in my pet region/ecosystem/study system? I want to replicate this kind of research in the Northeast — and across a gradient of sites where phenology is tied to snowmelt (true alpine areas of Katahdin and the Presidential range), and where the two are (I think) decoupled (Cadillac Mountain). Winkler and I wrote a blog post together in 2016, I think I can convince him to collaborate on a larger scale — and get him to New England! 

Bonus “Reads”

Recent podcast episodes tangentially related to recent blogging

• This American Life covers The Feather Thief. My review of the book.

• Outside/In reports on underrepresentation in outdoor gear (aka 'shrink it and pink it' does not make women happy shoppers, especially when we can't find our sizes, preferred styles, or performance level). This touches on some of the same themes — inclusion & diversity in the outdoors — as my response to “Have Ecologists Lost Their Senses? Walking and Reflection as Ecological Method”

Science Twitter and the Secretly Super-rare Saxifragaceae

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*I do love rock-climbing botanists!

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

Not Seeing the Grass for the Trees

I appreciate repetition.

My favorite class in high school was AP Chemistry, but I think I owe most of my AP success to the previous year's slog through regular Chemistry. By the time I took AP Chem, all the basics were finally settled in my mind and I could hit the higher-level concepts that I’d only whiffed at the year before.

The second time I ran a marathon I had so much more fun — and so much more left in the tank for that last, terrible 10K.

The second time I read a paper from a new-to-me sub-discipline, or with specific, sophisticated statistical methods, I get a similar boost of adrenaline and understanding. These déjà vu methods* are often serendipitous — it’s hard to consciously search for them — but they are so rewarding when I stumble into them. Déjà vu methods struck PLoS ONE this winter in the form of land cover change captured in Landsat images. The Landsat program has been capturing satellite images of Earth since the 1970s, and researchers can compare decades of Landsat images to tell a time-lapse story of changing land cover at a high resolution. Two great papers used this method to explore trends in forest cover on opposite sides of the globe: New England in the United States and the Western Ghats in India. 

As I read Thompson et al.’s ‘Forest loss in New England: A projection of recent trends’ I could imagine the last twenty years of land cover change in my mind’s eye before even glancing at the figures. I’ve lived in New England nearly my entire life; I went to grad school in one of the three case study sub-regions, and worked college summers in another. The third case study sub-region is a long stretch of coastal Maine that I drove through every field season on my way to Acadia National Park. I’ve collaborated on remote sensing work, but it’s not my wheelhouse, so reading Thompson’s paper allowed me to enter this world in a really intuitive way because the results and projections already felt familiar to me. 

And then I read ‘Not seeing the grass for the trees: Timber plantations and agriculture shrink tropical montane grassland by two-thirds over four decades in the Palani Hills, a Western Ghats Sky Island.’ Here, Dr. Arasumani and a team of academic and non-academic researchers used four decades of Landsat images to quantify patterns of land cover change in grasslands, forests, plantations and agriculture in a region of southern India called the Palani Hills. This is a landscape that I could not imagine — fortunately Arasumani’s team collaborated with photographer Prasenjeet Yadav who created an amazing 4-minute film. This video is a fantastic introduction to the ecosystem with beautiful footage of the shola grasslands and shola forests. ‘Not seeing the grass for the trees’ is a response to the local perception that timber plantations have replaced shola forests in the sky island of the Palani Hills. Local conservation policies center on restoring shola forest trees, with little focus on the shola grasslands. So, a group of scientists began using Landsat to challenge the current conservation view. As Dr. Milind Bunyan and Dr. Robin Vijayan write, 

“The popular discourse that timber plantations are invading shola forests runs deep and wide, but there are exceptions to this observation. In the state of Kerala for instance, there is growing appreciation that it is the grasslands that have been lost to plantations and not the forests. The state that holds a majority of this ecosystem both in original and modified states (viz. Tamil Nadu) however, largely believes that plantations have invaded forests (although there are individuals in the state forest department who now recognize the loss of grasslands).”

Coauthor Robert Stewart and his late wife Tanya Balcar had been working in the Palani Hills since the 1980s: their Vattakanal Conservation Trust focused on forest and grassland conservation and they were among the first to notice that the grasslands were disappearing. The story of how Tanya Balcar’s observations snowballed into this paper is a lovely peek behind the curtain of conservation research: the collaborations, the shoestring budget, the surprises, and the great food all ring true to my experiences working with NGOs and government agencies in New England. Bunyan and Vijayan gave me a long version to edit down, but I love the details too much.

“[Tanya and Robert] convinced some of us who were working on different projects in this landscape including Ian Lockwood, a two-generation resident of Palani Hills, and a friend of Tanya & Bob. Using his skills as a geographer, Ian conducted a preliminary GIS analysis, which revealed the dramatic changes that had occurred during his lifetime; he then published these results on his blog. This caught our attention when we realized that much of the change in the landscape had occurred very recently, and providentially within the period of LANDSAT imageries.Anil and Sunayana Choudhary from INTACH Kodaikanal (listed in the acknowledgements) were the people who really made the project happen. They generated INTACH funding for the project to conduct fieldwork, and to hire a technician to do the GIS and ground-truthing. As with most research projects however, we did not stick to the script and ended up hiring two technicians (one for the lab and the other for the field), despite uncertainties at the time on how we would support both of them. Of these, Danish Khan came with a tremendous wanderlust and was therefore, the natural choice for our field component, and Arasumani M., who graduated at top of his class, was the lab person conducting the GIS analyses.The only thread that binds all of us is a desire to work in the landscape, albeit on varied aspects, and understand and document the threats and changes in this landscape, which required a baseline that we could use for future studies. This was an extremely frugal study, and most of us contributed significant amounts of time (and in some instances, money) to the project in different ways. With different roles on the project, we found working together relatively easy and complementary. A lot of our work also involved working different physical locations (including putting these responses to your questions together), and used cloud-platforms like Google Docs. We’re also proud to say that our meetings were almost like large family gatherings, full of great food (supplied generously by the Choudharies), and travelling through the landscape.”

Through Landsat images and ground-truthing, this team found that shola grasslands — the dominant cover type forty years ago — had been invaded by agriculture and plantations. Agriculture and plantations overran shola grasslands with different spatial patterns of replacement and degradation: agriculture takes over in “large, compact, and spatially aggregated patches” while plantations puncture the landscape with small, irregular-shaped patches as invasive plantation species spread into the ecosystem. This analysis also found that only half of the existing grasslands are currently included in the Kodaikanal Wildlife Sanctuary; they identified eight additional grasslands along cliff edges or bordering abandoned agricultural areas to include in this sanctuary.

Finally, the authors conclude with four specific conservation recommendations: (1) identify and conserve core grasslands (2) check invasion in sparsely invaded grasslands (3) review indiscriminate removal of mature plantations (4) contain agriculture. I asked Bunyan and Vijayan how these recommendations have been received by the Kodaikanal Wildlife Sanctuary and the local communities. They write “In addition to our town hall meetings, we have had several interactions with forest department staff of the KWS to disseminate our conservation recommendations. We opine that the Forest Department is positive, and we hope to work with them to be able to achieve the goals stated in the paper. The publicity that this article has generated, which has been covered in the national media and now internationally, will go a long way in promoting these recommendations.” 

I wish good luck to them as they continue this important work! And thank you for enriching my winter with beautiful images of the shola grassland!

References:

Arasumani M, Khan D, Das A, Lockwood I, Stewart R, Kiran RA, et al. (2018) Not seeing the grass for the trees: Timber plantations and agriculture shrink tropical montane grassland by two-thirds over four decades in the Palani Hills, a Western Ghats Sky Island. PLoS ONE 13(1): e0190003. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0190003 

Thompson JR, Plisinski JS, Olofsson P, Holden CE, Duveneck MJ (2017) Forest loss in New England: A projection of recent trends. PLoS ONE 12(12): e0189636. https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0189636    

* To expand on déjà vu methods, I present the thylacine. Last November I read a preprint of a paper on thylacine extinction; I don’t actually know anything about thylacines, but my friend Kevin Burgio was a coauthor, I had studied abroad in Australia when I was in college, and I thought it sounded cool. This thylacine paper introduced me to Bayesian Extinction Estimators and less than a month later, my PhD advisor published ‘A statistical estimator for determining the limits of contemporary and historic phenology’ — a paper that repurposed Bayesian extinction estimators for historical and herbaria-based phenology data. Reading the thylacine paper serendipitously primed me to fully understand this methodological approach for my own field (plant phenology). I'm not the brightest crayon in the box, but if I just keep reading déjà vu methods, I'll make it to razzmatazz.

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. 

Biodiversity Patterns in Melanesian Coral Reef Fish: New Research with Old Naturalists

Old naturalists are my jam. I dedicated my PhD dissertation to a 19th century botanist who had spent her childhood following Thoreau around the Concord woods. I have a soft spot for research that draws on the work of older ecologists, for data that was handwritten before the advent of ballpoint pens, for 21st century papers based on museum natural history collections. This nostalgia is well-timed: museum collections are increasingly digitized and freely available online, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library is doing the same for scientific literature on biodiversity.

Just as my kind of fieldwork no longer requires taking the steamship to downeast Maine and a buckboard on wild roads between logging communities, my scholarship is not dependent on scouring the library stacks for a particular volume or traveling to the archives of a natural history collection to comb through specimens for just the right sample. In the 21st century it is significantly easier to be an armchair laptop historical ecologist. Easier, but not easy.

“Natural history and collections seem to be a bit of a hard sell when it comes to the ecological literature, which surprised me,” says Dr. Kathryn L. Amatangelo. She and Dr. Joshua Drew just published a PLOS ONE paper using coral reef fish data from museum collections records, peer reviewed literature including fish check lists, and biological inventories. The biodiversity pattern they were attempting to analyze and understand — that reef fish diversity in the Indo-West Pacific decreases along a longitudinal gradient from species-rich Papua New Guinea to species-poor American Samoa — was described in 1906.

Amatangelo laments, “It seems almost passé to look at old collections and think about how and why long-dead historians collected their data. When you try to combine that with statistics and scientific analyses people seem to get a little squirrely.”

Drew and Amatangelo’s paper “Community Assembly of Coral Reef Fishes Along the Melanesian Biodiversity Gradient” applies modern ecological theory and big data statistical tools to observations recorded by David Starr Jordan, a Victorian-era ichthyologist who was both the founding president of Stanford University and a suspect in the possible murder of Jane Stanford. If that legacy is not problematic enough, he was also into eugenics.

Thanks to the efforts of Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), we can read Jordan’s 1906 paper “On a Collection of Fishes from Fiji” where he notes the diminishing diversity of fish as you travel across Melanesia. Drew remarks, “historical ecologists are always looking for old species lists, and it was super cool to find that he worked in my study system in Fiji.” Drew describes a Jordan as “an ichthyological hero of mine, a complex and not unproblematic figure”: Jordan’s writing on ichthyological biogeography and community change, his system for organizing ichthyological collections and his service on the US Fish Commission, a precursor of NOAA, provide a foundation for the kind of work that Drew and Amatangelo so beautifully execute here.

In the pursuit of quantitatively describing this biodiversity gradient, Drew and Amatangelo compiled presence/absence records for 396 fish species in five taxa across 7 countries. As Drew describes it, this dataset was created from “a massive literature search from collections-based and peer-review based lists that were then double-checked with FishBase.” They looked for agreement across all three datasets (collections, literature, and FishBase), which gave them more confidence in the data since it was not susceptible to the biases present in only one dataset. Amatangelo is a community ecologist with a plant background, she partnered with Josh Drew through a twitter connection, bringing statistical savvy to these new-to-her taxa and ecosystems. I asked her what it was like to work with unfamiliar study species in this project. “One downside was that things that were intuitive to Josh, such as why some traits are important, was a bit of a mystery to me. That could also be considered a positive, though, because it meant that Josh had to be able to explain WHY they were important, which helped in writing the paper.”

The paper’s ultimate goal was to illuminate the processes behind the reef fish biodiversity pattern to inform conservation efforts. Drew acknowledges that their conclusions are not ground-shattering — the biodiversity gradient was described 110 years ago, and likely broadly known before then in local communities. “But it’s nice to put a p-value on it,” he says. “Natural history and traditional ecological knowledge are not always recognized because they don’t come with a p-value, so here we did that. We probably could have told you the same result before, but this adds weight to the management recommendations.” Those management recommendations include collaborations across Melanesia to more efficiently share resources and partition the region into functional biodiversity groups.

Through the power of twitter, digitization, and online collections two modern ecologists were able to build on a paper from 1906 and study Melanesian coral reef fish diversity from their laptop screens in the United States. So much of this data would be instantly recognizable to Jordan, but so little of the actual process of collaborating, compiling and analyzing data, and writing a paper has remained constant since 1906.

Drew reflects on this revolution in his recent correspondence to Nature Ecology and Evolution: “Digitization of museum collections holds the potential to enhance researcher diversity.” He and coauthors write that “the advent of digitization (open access to images and specimen data) now makes a wealth of biodiversity information broadly available…Digitization allows access to museum holdings to those for whom collections have typically been out of reach.” The concentration of collections in the Global North is a reflection of our discipline’s role in the history of exploration and colonialism. Untangling this broader context of past research is perhaps the most impressive, thoughtful work that a historical ecologist could pursue.

In two papers this fall Drew has managed to both uphold the ichthyological legacy of Jordan, and articulately argue that the museum collections Jordan once organized in his spare time from being abhorrently racist, could be, in digital form, a force for increasing diversity in science. 

References:

Drew, Joshua A., and Kathryn L. Amatangelo. "Community assembly of coral reef fishes along the Melanesian biodiversity gradient." PloS one 12, no. 10 (2017): e0186123.

Drew, Joshua A., Corrie S. Moreau, and Melanie L. J. Stiassny. "Digitization of museum collections holds the potential to enhance researcher diversity." Nature Ecology & Evolution (2017):10.1038/s41559-017-0401-6