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 

On Story Telling

Last Monday night I took the mic at a Toronto bar. The whole second floor was full of conservation scientists in town for the North American Congress for Conservation Biology, the music from below thumped into our enclave, and we settled in with local beers to listen to stories of childhood tree forts, surfers tying themselves in kelp like sea otters, and daylilies dug from the lot where a great-grandmother’s garden once grew.

This was Plant Love Stories Live — a storytelling event that grew out of a blog that grew out of a tiny conversation in January between a group of postdocs in a hotel conference room who were maybe a little bit burnt out from discussing how to impact policy and what progress we’d made on a major literature review.

Plant Love Stories is a collection of personal stories about how plants have shaped our lives. As conservation researchers, we often see plants as a backdrop, a hazy, nondescript habitat for the charismatic megafauna. And yet, almost everyone has a story about a plant — the venus fly trap you didn’t realize needed water as well as flies, the delicious fruitiness of fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes, the unexpected utility of an alder tree in the middle of a fieldwork disaster. Since its launch on Valentine’s Day 2018, Plant Love Stories has published weekly stories from plant ecologists, scientists who are stridently not-botanists, artists, parents, kids, professors, and undergraduates. The beloved plants are house plants, garden plants, greenhouse plants, wild plants, trees, seeds, tattoos, and million-year-old fossils. The growing collection of love stories reminds us that we all share emotional connections to wild, growing things. Full disclosure: I am among the Plant Love Stories cofounders. I was one of the postdocs in the hotel conference room in January — basically wilting in my seat from a long week of trainings and meetings and panels — when Dr. Becky Barak animatedly exclaimed “we need plant love stories!”

Barak knows about the power of storytelling. In 2016 she delivered an amazing talk titled ‘Big Green Things Start Tiny’ as a part of the Ecological Society of America’s ‘Up-Goer Five Challenge: Using Common Language to Communicate Your Science to the Public.’ Limited to only the 1,000 most commonly used English words, Barak and the other presenters found creative language to express complicated theories, interactions, and results in memorable and entertaining talks. This session was especially memorable for me because I was taking copious notes. I was a PLOS Ecology Reporting Fellow at ESA 2016 — I had pitched writing about the Up-Goer session in my Reporting Fellowship application, and ESA 2016 was my first experience blogging for PLOS.* Ultimately, I wrote “Science Communication, Simple Words, and Story Telling at ESA 2016” a post about Up-Goer Five, language, and an ESA Special Session titled ‘Engaging with the Wider World: True Tales Told Live.’ I remember this event as a cross between The Moth and casual office hours with your favorite professor or TA. Four scientists shared stories on the theme of engagement. There were no notes or slides, I’m not even sure if they were sitting in chairs or just perched at the edge of a stage, I mostly remember it feeling very intimate.

On the PLOS Ecology blog I wrote “There was a real sense of craving in the audience as we watched these ecologists talking about science communication. We want more examples of successful science communication, and more opportunities to practice these skills ourselves.” I did not realize how personal, or prescient these words were at the time. The “craved for” examples of successful science communication are proliferating.

Storytelling is increasingly recognized as a valuable tool for communication within our scientific community — in presentations and papers — and for engaging with audiences beyond our journals and conferences. Looking inward, the 2017 paper ‘Tell me a story! A plea for more compelling conference presentations’ is an amazing resource. There’s also the 2017 PNAS opinion piece, ‘Finding the plot in science storytelling in hopes of enhancing science communication.’ My fellow PLOS Ecology Editor Dr. Jeff Atkins explored the 2016 paper ‘Narrative Style Influences Citation Frequency in Climate Change Science’ in a blog post that dives into the importance of storytelling within the scientific community. In February 2018, PLOS Biology collected ‘Conservation stories from the front lines’ to highlight “the deeply human side of research…These narratives present peer-reviewed and robust science but also include the muddy boots and bloody knees, ravaging mosquitoes, crushing disappointment, and occasional euphoria their authors experienced.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the authors include Dr. Annaliese Hettinger, a storyteller at ESA 2016’s Engaging with the Wider World: True Tales Told Live, and Dr. Nick Haddad, an ESA 2016 Up-Goer Five presenter. 

At ESA 2018, there will be a ComSciCon workshop: “Story-Tell Your Science with ComSciCon: The Communicating Science Workshop for Graduate Students.” I attended the incredibly rewarding three-day ComSciCon in Boston in 2015. The ESA ComSciCon workshop agenda includes a write-a-thon session “where attendees can receive expert feedback on a piece of writing from a media of their choosing, from experienced academic communicators.” The write-a-thon was one of my favorite experiences at ComSciCon: I workshopped a podcast script — though I had absolutely no podcast production experience — and I basically abandoned the idea at the end of the workshop in June 2015, tucking my notes into a folder, filing it away while I went back to fieldwork and dissertation-writing. Then, last summer, my postdoc advisor suggested my name to the organizers of TEDx Piscataqua River. I had about a week to create a pitch for a TEDx talk — while I was in the middle of preparing for ESA 2017, packing to move to Maine, and submitting my final dissertation edits. But, I had that old ComSciCon folder. I dusted off the podcast script, re-wrote it as a talk pitch, and sent it to TEDx Piscataqua River. That talk — “Botanizing with my 19th century girlfriend” — is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.** 

All the little opportunities to “story-tell your science,” all the examples we see modeled in special sessions and special paper collections, they build on each other quietly in the back of our minds until suddenly we are the one holding the mic in the front of the room. Looking back at my 2016 notes, I realize that the ESA 2016 live story telling event was organized by COMPASS and the Wilburforce Foundation and recognize a Smith Fellow alumna among the speakers. Plant Love Stories Live was hosted by the David H. Smith Fellowship, the Liber Ero Fellowship, the Wilburforce Foundation, and COMPASS. It is hard not to feel like the PLOS Ecology Reporting Fellowship has magically propelled me into this surreal present — the ESA meeting where I blogged my way through the Up-Goer Five session was also the ESA meeting where I outlined my Smith Fellowship proposal. I spent so much of that week thinking about storytelling and reporting on other ecologists' stories, I must have semi-consciously absorbed some of these lessons and ambitions to become a better storyteller myself. And so, in Toronto last week, I found myself ready to kick off a live story telling event at a scientific conference, and all those ESA 2016 memories flooded in. Somehow it was two years later, and 2,400 miles north of ESA 2016 — all the thinking and reading and writing around storytelling that ESA 2016 sparked had become a kind of personal practice. Now, I had the mic and I had the story to tell. 

References

• Langin, K.M., 2017. Tell me a story! A plea for more compelling conference presentations. The Condor, 119(2), pp.321-326.

• Martinez-Conde, S. and Macknik, S.L., 2017. Opinion: Finding the plot in science storytelling in hopes of enhancing science communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(31), pp.8127-8129.

• Gross L, Hettinger A, Moore JW, Neeley L (2018) Conservation stories from the front lines. PLoS Biol 16(2): e2005226. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2005226

 *A quick search through my documents folder unearthed my original pitch: “In addition to the traditional sessions, the Ignite 1 Up Goer Five session will be an amazing exploration of science communication itself: will the 1,000 most common words in the English language lead to clarity or confusion? Is this an effective strategy for reaching the general public or a fun stunt that will baffle even fellow ecologists?” 

** Aside from co-founding Plant Love Stories of course! Please submit your plant love stories!

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.

Science Communication, Simple Words, and Story Telling at ESA 2016

A guest post from PLOS Ecology Reporting Fellow, Caitlin McDonough, on research from the Ecological Society of America Scientific Meeting in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, August 7-11, 2016.

On Tuesday afternoon at the Ecological Society of America 2016 Conference in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, amid the many Latin species names and varied sub-discipline jargon, it was possible to stumble upon a session of talks about blue flyers, spring pretty flowers, God’s creatures, and animals with six legs and no bone in their back. The audience fell in love with black back wood hitters, cheered for flying friends with six legs and four wings that like sweet things and help plants with sex and was touched by the sentiment that the land had memory made up of things in the dirtand much of the memory was lost. 

This was the Up Goer Five Ignite Session, where seven brave scientists took on the challenge made famous by xkcd comic author Randall Munroe and his Thing Explainer book and presented their research using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language, originating from Munroe’s eponymous example. In the ESA session, the phylogeny of grassland plants was reduced to grasses, grasssish, smells fresh, sun flowers, fixers, and roses and climate change was described as the whole earth surface is getting more and more hot. The presenters approached their talks with a high level of creativity and humor, and the audience responded with enthusiasm, empathy, and #UpGoESA tweets.

Rebecca Barak opened the session with a high-energy summary of grassland restoration research. Her talk featured the poetic land memory line and the hilariously simplified grass phylogeny, as well as the explanation that one piece of equipment used to study seeds was the special machine that doctors use to look inside of you.

Nick Haddad asked Can I light a fire to save those damn butter flies? With surprising dexterity he wove the story of Icarus and Daedalus into his research on fire adaptation and complex species interactions. Here, we noticed how difficult it is to mark temporal change and population dynamics of a butterfly species with only the 1,000 most common words: over five tens of years the numbers of these plants have gone down to zero. The stark phrasing that people may need to kill these animals to save them was very powerful in this pared down vocabulary.

Margaret Lowman may have smuggled in a few extra words, but her talk about working with priests in Ethiopia to save sacred forests (birds eye view of trees: in the center is a round house called a church) was a refreshing reminder that there are whole communities that ecologists traditionally neglect to engage with, and these have the potential to be fruitful partnerships.

David Inouye shared research from his field site (or where he spends his time playing while not teaching) and explained phenology models by asking the audience Can we guess when that will happen? His talk featured the memorably phrased description of his Colorado field site location as the place where people over 21 can buy grass to get high. Samuel Cowell regaled us with tales of the nesting behavior of blue flyers — their propensity for stealing some wood hitter homes, but also their territorial protection of other wood hitter homes, ultimately summarizing their complex interactions as blue flyers are bad and good to the wood hitters.

Jeff Atkins’s visuals — drawings commissioned from his and his colleagues’ children — strongly resonated with the audience. Pairing crayons and construction paper with the big green stuff and the small green stuff, in the mountains and the not so flat ground was a brilliant take on the simplified vocabulary.

Finally, Elizabeth Waring closed the session with her comparison of Old Green Things and New Green Things. The crowd loved her terms for nitrogen deposition (extra ground food to make green things for humans grow harder faster stronger) and greenhouse experiments (grown in a hot box, I changed how hot the grass got).

Science communication, language, and accessibility were at the center of the post-presentations discussion. Across all of the talks, the most memorable and successful Up Goer Five phrases didn’t just substitute simple words for scientific jargon, they were emotional and evocative compositions. Distilling one’s science into the 1,000 most common words was described as an opportunity to influence the connotation of common (but not top 1,000 words common) phrases with thoughtful word choice. The direct vocabulary has a sharp impact. As one audience member noted, this was not just an exercise in how good are you at using a thesaurus — the speakers found ways to be poetic, expressive, and clear.

Restricting word choice to the 1000 most common words highlights how few of our common words are ecological terms. In a way, this highlights the difficulty of science communication with the general public: our vocabularies do not always intersect. Meg Lowman wondered aloud if we could add 125 of “our words” back to the common vernacular. The loss of nature words from the Oxford Children’s Dictionary and our vocabulary in general has been noted. Is this a crusade for ecologists? What are the 125 words that we most miss? And what can we do to reintroduce these into words so that the next generation of Up Goer Five ecologists has the ability to say “trees”? 

Great story telling was not limited to the Up Goer Five session. At the Wednesday night Special Session “Engaging with the Wider World True Tales Told Live” four ecologists were given the whole range of the English language to speak to their experiences in diverse forms of engagement. During his tale Matthew Williamson confessed to fellow story-teller and ESA President Monica Turner that years ago, in a punk rock phase, he had joined her field team as kid with a Mohawk and a bad attitude. The narratives tracked births, deaths, career changes, and community building; they reflected on intersections of creativity, courage and advocacy. There were funny moments — Monica Turner admitted “I am not Stephen Colbert!” — and deeply poignant personal stories. In beautifully crafted prose, Annaliese Hettinger described the joy, isolation, and exhaustion she found in finishing her Ph.D. within a year of the birth of her son, while caring for her dying mother who, decades before, had defended her own Ph.D. when Annaliese was an infant. There was a real sense of craving in the audience as we watched these ecologists talking about science communication. We want more examples of successful science communication, and more opportunities to practice these skills ourselves. These opportunities are at ESA; among our ranks are excellent science communicators, our meetings feature multiple workshops focused on diverse engagement opportunities, and the Up Goer Five audience passionately embraced the idea of an annual Ignite Session. Hopefully this is an areas where we can continue to build and grow. 

Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie is a PhD candidate in the Primack Lab in the Biology Department at Boston University. She spends her field seasons in Acadia National Park, Maine studying leaf out and flowering phenology and patterns of historical species loss across plant communities. Her field methods include three ridge transects that are conveniently located adjacent to beautiful running trails and carriage roads. Away from Acadia’s granite ridges, she’s interested in underutilized sources of historical ecology data including herbarium specimens, field notebooks, photographs, and old floras; the potential for citizen science in phenology research; and the intersection of science and policy.  (Follow Caitlin on Twitter @CaitlinInMaine)

Leveraging the Power of Biodiversity Specimen Data for Ecological Research

A guest post from PLOS Ecology Reporting Fellow, Caitlin McDonough, on research from the Ecological Society of America Scientific Meeting in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, August 7-11, 2016.

Leveraging the Power of Biodiversity Specimen Data for Ecological Research at ESA 2016 While ecologists spend their graduate days troubleshooting code, writing manuscripts, and fighting with dataloggers, they often trace their roots back to a love of natural history--an acknowledgement of a childhood curiosity sparked by museums, camping trips, and backyard bug collections. This curiosity ties us ecologists to a long line of scientists, taxonomists, and collectors; we imagine that we could have sailed on the Beagle, or climbed Chimborazo, or that we would have happily canoed the wild Allagash River to botanize with Kate Furbish. On Wednesday morning, a group of 21st century ecologists presented a modern twist on these natural history dreams, with research in collaboration with these taxonomists, botanists, and collectors of the past. (A video of the session will be posted here.) 

iDigBio (Integrated Digitized Biocollections) organized this session, which brought together a diverse array of ecologists who have leveraged the power of biodiversity specimen data to approach 21st century problems in taxonomy, conservation biology, and climate change research. Each project relied on some form of biodiversity specimen data — from herbarium specimens to insect collections to marine collections — for applications ranging from restoration ecology to unraveling cryptic speciation, or creating species distribution models to tracking patterns in phenology. Recent efforts to digitize biological specimen data have sparked a renaissance in their use — pressed plants and pinned bees that once sat neglected in a dusty corner are now accessible to researchers thousands of miles away. In many cases, the 19th century collectors would likely recognize these research goals as they too were interested in species distributions,  recorded phenological events, and made observations about interactions between herbivores and plants. But, Thoreau did not geotag his field notes, and Linneaus might be surprised to find his herbarium specimen available as a jpeg. The importance of making biodiversity specimen data digitally accessible was clear from the start of the session.

Pamela Soltis noted that there are over 1,600 natural history collections in the U.S. with somewhere between one and two billion specimens. But iDigBio estimates that only 10% of biodiversity specimens are digitized. Throughout the session, presenters noted both the benefits of accessing the digitized data and the challenges of working with taxa and trophic levels that were underrepresented in the digital specimen world. Katja Seltmann lamented the lack of digitized parisitoids collections, and called out a bias towards plants and pollinators. Joan Meiners, who uses digital natural history collection specimens to investigate native bee conservation, showed a graphic of the low proportion of digitized bee specimens at major U.S. insect collections. The next speaker, Francois Michonneau, topped both of their complaints with an example of a historic sea cucumber collection that had been preserved in pieces, the equivalent of an ornithologist placing a beak and talons in a glass bottle and calling it a bird collection.  It is clear that the biodiversity specimens that are digitized are inspiring new research. Emily Meineke shared the origin story of her herbaria research: her project began in her kitchen. While flipping through old specimen data online during a procrastination jag, she noticed herbivory damage captured in one of Linnaeus’ specimens. With a little more digging, she found evidence of herbivory in many specimens — leaf mines, chewing damage, and galls — as well as actual insects preserved in the old leaves. Another example of unintentional data captured in herbarium specimens is Amanda Gallinat’s fruit phenology study. She found over 3,000 specimens comprising 55 species in seven major New England herbaria that contained mature fruit pressed among the plant material. Just as Meineke realized that herbaria offer unprecedented opportunities to understand what factors drive herbivory rates across large spatial and temporal scales, Gallinat was able to assess patterns in fruiting across native and invasive species at a regional scale from the 19th century to the present. Meineke has begun surveying for herbivory damage in the Harvard University Herbarium collection, but she is also working to make this a citizen science project called Bite Marks in the Zooniverse. Soon everyone will have the opportunity to look at herbivory damage while procrastinating in their kitchens! 

In addition to the diverse research that has emerged from digitized biological specimens, this session provided some practical advice for all ecologists. Pamela Soltis presented Charlotte Germain-Aubrey’s project “Using museum data for species distribution modeling: The case of plants in Florida” and provided a thoughtful behind-the-scenes look at the building of a maximum entropy model. She deliberately explored the process behind decisions about climate data (e.g. average climate vs. climate data from the year of collection for each specimen), the area in which the model trains, smoothing response curves, and the number of background points. François Michonneau closed his talk with a great overview of his best practices for instituting data quality checks in R code workflow. While these skills are typically missing from our training, he stressed the importance of building a culture of documentation and replication, recommending courses from datacarpentry.org. Katelin Pearson showed that the collector community — a group that is regularly in the field, well-trained to recognize patterns and norms, and communicate with other experts — currently lacks the protocols and the semantics to document outliers in a consistent, meaningful way. This community has great potential to detect outliers in phenology, distribution, ecology, behavior, morphology, but at the present there is no direct feed between the collectors and ecologists who are tracking changes or outliers.

Finally, Libby Ellwood closed the session with an overview of iDigBio’s citizen science projects to engage the public in the work of digitizing the many, many biological specimens that are not yet a part of the digital record. 

Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie is a PhD candidate in the Primack Lab in the Biology Department at Boston University. She spends her field seasons in Acadia National Park, Maine studying leaf out and flowering phenology and patterns of historical species loss across plant communities. Her field methods include three ridge transects that are conveniently located adjacent to beautiful running trails and carriage roads. Away from Acadia’s granite ridges, she’s interested in underutilized sources of historical ecology data including herbarium specimens, field notebooks, photographs, and old floras; the potential for citizen science in phenology research; and the intersection of science and policy.  (Follow Caitlin on Twitter @CaitlinInMaine)