Wrapped and Read: A Reading Advent Update

Spotify just told me that Superfruit was my artist of the year. “You discovered 265 new artists this year, but you really vibed with Superfruit,” Spotify Wrapped announced*. Google Scholar has not released a comparable look back at my year; there is no sleek graphic design of my year in citations. And Google Sheets is equally lagging on a social-media-sharable data visualization of my admittedly haphazard #365papers record keeping. I guess I will have to manually reflect on my reading the old-fashioned way — through blogging. 

To kick off December, I created a list of twelve 2019 papers that I had really meant to read this year, but by late November were still kicking around in my ‘To Read Pile.’ Each business day in December, I’ve carved out a little time to curl up with a mug of tea, don a cozy sweatshirt, light a little candle, and read one of these papers. The ritual is so lovely. I expected this — I knew the reading itself would be a kind of reward. The challenge lay mostly in creating the list: wading through the debris of my ‘To Read Pile’ after prepping for summer conferences and fall teaching hobbled, and then assassinated, my reading habits. But once you have a list, you just have to brew the tea and show up in sweats — the paper is chosen and waiting. It is the meal prep of staying on top of the literature: a dozen tupperwares of perfectly portioned pasta, a standing line of freezer bags with curried squash soup that were frozen lying on their sides on baking pans and now stack perfectly in the freezer, a double-batch of zucchini-corn-black bean empañadas made from scratch. I will tell you from experience that those foil-wrapped freezer empañadas are doubly amazing: they are delicious and some previous version of yourself already decided what’s for dinner. I knew that making the reading list for my advent of ecological literature would be the hardest part of the 12 Days of Reading; I did not expect that I would love the gift of having a list so much.

I picked some pretty great papers — see the reviews below — but even more fundamental than the quality of the papers is the fact that they are listed and for the last seven and the next five business days I don’t need exert any mental energy on choosing what to read. I cannot recommend the act of listing enough. 

If you are looking for papers to add to your list, here are some recommendations from my list: If you want to bone up on reading that will help you practice inclusion in your classroom and research, read On reporting scientific and racial history and An alternative hypothesis for the evolution of same-sex sexual behaviour in animals. 

If you want to reflect on active learning in your teaching and how to help students understand the benefits of feeling uncomfortable in active learning, read Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. 

If you want to think BIG about ecology and evolution across geologic time scales, read Why mountains matter for biodiversity. 

If you want to think small about local extinctions and species traits over the past century and really dig into what we can learn from historical ecological data, read Species characteristics affect local extinctions. 

If you are early career and you just feel like maybe you don’t have enough imposter syndrome in your life, read Postdocs’ lab engagement predicts trajectories of PhD students’ skill development. It is extremely hard to read this paper, in which a cohort of graduate students are judged annually on a single piece of academic writing, and not try to imagine the trajectory of your own skill development. The paper models how students transition among skill levels from year to year. Honestly, I do not self-identify as a person with a simple, positive linear growth over time. I think I was among the oddball 13.1% of students that apparently decreased in skill level and then increased. But aside from the general cloud of existential reflection, I struggled with this paper because I could not reconcile the results (“PIs’ laboratory and mentoring activities do not significantly predict students’ skill development trajectories”) with the discussion’s complete lack of accountability for PIs. If a postdoc’s attendance at lab discussions is a more powerful predictor of PhD students’ skill development than the PI’s mentoring, I don’t see this as a feel-good story about the power of postdocs. (Obviously postdocs are awesome and we work wicked hard and we deserve only good things.) Postdocs are also a reflection of the PI’s mentoring; the idea that “postdocs participating in laboratory discussions” is somehow a predictor that is independent of the PI’s mentorship or lab culture seems fundamentally flawed. I was particularly put off by the suggestion that, pursuant to these results, postdocs should receive training in effective mentoring practices. In literally the next sentence, the authors admit “postdocs are underpaid relative to the value they contribute to scholarly productivity” and yet instead of a call to better compensate postdocs, they would like to add to our responsibilities.

Finally, this recommendation may be a tad over-specific, but if you want to really understand the question your committee member was working to articulate during the closed session of your dissertation defense while you made confused faces and pointed to the literature on phenological sensitivity, read On quantifying the apparent temperature sensitivity of plant phenology. (The middle author was my committee member; I totally understand his question now and it is a really freaking good one.) Happy Reading! 

*Thanks for the introduction to this band, Dr. Becky Barak & the amazing group text of the Plant Love Stories team.

She's Making a List...

It occurred to me in November that my #ToReadPile was beyond overflowing. One of my friends* had recently published a very cool paper and it was receiving wonderful press, but between lesson planning, job applications, and shepherding my own manuscripts, I could not imagine carving out time or mental energy to read anything that wasn’t directly related to my own research. It seemed like so many amazing papers had come out in the second half of 2019, and I had barely had time to skim their authors’ twitter-ready one-liners, let alone their abstracts. 

Friend of the blog Josh Drew has a December social media tradition he dubbed ‘OP12’ for Operation Productive December. I tweeted that I wanted to use #OP12 to read more this year, and one of my old field assistants piped up to ask about the hashtag. Drew explained on twitter, “[It is an] on-line accountability project I have to help keep me from falling into the ‘oh it's the holidays’ lull and not getting anything done for a month. The goal is to be healthy but to also make sure we get stuff done, and typically I choose fun projects to keep me entertained.”

I envisioned my reading list as a #25Daysof Fishmas or #RadventcalendaR-style project. Advent calendars are my jam — my birthday is December 24, I’m always down for daily chocolate, and as a pretty-secular parent of two young kids, I am here for a community-wide countdown awaiting a new baby**. My original plan to pick ten papers from 2019 quickly seemed adorably naive after an hour cleaning out my #ToReadPile folder yielded over three dozen new downloads. I waded back in and narrowed the list to twelve. It matches the song, though instead of reading over the traditional twelve days of Christmas, I plan to read over roughly the first twelve business days of December, wrapping up in time to put the project down at the semester’s end and grind through grading. To make this a luxe reading ritual, I bought a loose-leaf tea advent calendar and high-graded it for the twelve best-sounding flavors. I pulled my twelve comfiest sweatshirts for a reading uniform and placed my favorite Maine candles by the reading nook.

Now, instead of feeling hopelessly behind on the literature, burnt out and ready to limp into my thirty-sixth year like the old golden retriever who almost didn’t make it back in Homeward Bound, I’m looking forward to this pile of papers with a renewed sense of purpose. I’m excited to treat myself to a good read tomorrow. My December reading list will take me on a journey from my staples in plant phenology, mountains, and local extinction; I’ll dig into research on active learning and climate literacy, topics close to my teaching practice; and I’ll stretch into the culture of science, same sex behavior in animals, and big picture conservation and policy pieces. 

Here are my twelve papers of Christmas, my readvent, my December literature review. Grab your mug and raid your own #ToReadPile or read these along with me. I’ll write about the journey, review the teas, and toast to a well-read December right here.

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

2. Perrigo, A., Hoorn, C., & Antonelli, A. (2019). Why mountains matter for biodiversity. Journal of Biogeography, 524(10), 300–11. http://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.13731

3. Feldon, D. F., Litson, K., Jeong, S., Blaney, J. M., Kang, J., Miller, C., et al. (2019). Postdocs’ lab engagement predicts trajectories of PhD students’ skill development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(42), 20910–20916. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1912488116

4. Zettlemoyer, M. A., McKenna, D. D., & Lau, J. A. (2019). Species characteristics affect local extinctions. American Journal of Botany, 106(4), 547–559. http://doi.org/10.1002/ajb2.1266

5. Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19251–19257. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821936116

6. Keenan, T. F., Richardson, A. D., & Hufkens, K. (2019). On quantifying the apparent temperature sensitivity of plant phenology. New Phytologist, 165, 73–8. http://doi.org/10.1111/nph.16114

7. Monk, J. D., Giglio, E., Kamath, A., Lambert, M. R., & McDonough, C. E. (2019). An alternative hypothesis for the evolution of same-sex sexual behaviour in animals. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 47, 1–10. http://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-1019-7

8. Peery, M. Z., Jones, G. M., Gutiérrez, R. J., Redpath, S. M., Franklin, A. B., Simberloff, D., et al. (2019). The conundrum of agenda‐driven science in conservation. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 17(2), 80–82. http://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2006

9. Fournier, A. M. V., White, E. R., & Heard, S. B. (2019). Site‐selection bias and apparent population declines in long‐term studies. Conservation Biology, 33(6), 1370–1379. http://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13371

10. Delach, A., Caldas, A., Edson, K. M., Krehbiel, R., Murray, S., Theoharides, K. A., et al. (2019). Agency plans are inadequate to conserve US endangered species under climate change. Nature Climate Change, 1–9. http://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0620-8

11. Duffy, M. A., Hammond, J. W., & Cheng, S. J. (2019). Preaching to the choir or composing new verses? Toward a writerly climate literacy in introductory undergraduate biology. Ecology and Evolution, 55(4), 550–14. http://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.5736

12. Catalano, A. S., Lyons-White, J., Mills, M. M., & Knight, A. T. (2019). Learning from published project failures in conservation. Biological Conservation, 238, 1–10. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.108223

 *Hi Max!

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

Reading & Listening to Cape Cod

Cape Cod does not appear on my CV. I study alpine plant ecology — my postdoc research is literally founded on carrying heavy things to high lakes — and the hooked peninsula of the Cape, curling into Nantucket Sound and pointing back towards Boston Harbor, is mostly beach and salt marsh and very light on high ground. 

When I’m on the Atlantic coast, I am in Acadia National Park. I grew up in central Massachusetts, where by law I think every baby shower must include a hardcover copy of Make Way For Ducklings and every childhood needs one bad sunburn from a Cape Cod beach (mine was Hyannis Port). But while I haven’t thought much about the landscape of the Cape in years (haven’t visited since 2014), this past week two journalism projects brought me back and reminded me of the Cape’s outsized influence on my own career in ecology. 

First, the Cape was recently featured in a short documentary and intensely immersive online news story. Reporters from The Boston Globe spent several months this summer researching the effects of climate change on Cape Cod. They interviewed scientists, fishermen, locals, and business owners, and followed the stories of salt marshes, beach erosion, nor’easters, and changing fisheries. Nestor Ramos’ story, “At the Edge of a Warming World,” is a stunning and thorough look at climate change across the Cape, from Bourne to Provincetown. I’m teaching a course on the science of climate change for non-science majors and I rearranged my syllabus after The Boston Globe published this story. That is how much I love these pieces — five weeks into teaching a revamped course, just as I had settled into the semester, I threw out completed lesson plans so that I could devote a whole class to “At the Edge of a Warming World”. The documentary and the immersive video-and-photography online experience of Ramos’ story are only available to The Boston Globe subscribers, but you can read the story at the Pulitzer Center website — it’s part of the Center’s Connected Coastlines Initiative supporting reporting on climate change in coastal communities. 

Early in “At the Edge of a Warming World” you are introduced to Liam’s, a clam shack that stood on Nauset beach since the 1950’s, and the March 2018 Nor’easter that wiped away 80 feet of beach and damaged the understructure beneath the restaurant. The building, once set way back from the ocean, barely survived the storm and the town tore it down later in the spring. Several students in my class shared their memories of Liam’s. There was this sense that a lost clam shack suddenly brought five weeks of reading and figures from the Fourth National Climate Assessment into focus. Climate change became intensely personal. The documentary is full of these moving interviews and powerful images from the Cape. I’ve never been to Liam’s, but I felt a similar nostalgia watching the ornithologists banding whimbrels in Wellfleet salt marshes.

Cape Cod is not on my CV, but it is the first place I tried field biology. Wellfleet is a part of that geography. I can’t even remember the actual field lab assignment, but in the summer of 2000 I stood ankle-deep in cordgrass and I’ve been a field biologist ever since. 

Cape Cod is not on my CV, but I’m beginning to think it should be. My first field course was a summer marine biology program in high school with field trips to Cape Cod and the Maine coast. Looking back, the Maine coast obviously looms large — I’m currently a Second Century Stewardship Fellow at Acadia National Park. But the Cape Cod trip was foundational. I remember reading about the dance of ice sheets, morraines, and outwash plains in the USGS booklet Geologic History of Cape Cod and it was my first inkling that geology was ephemeral, that kettle hole ponds might hold clues to unravel the history of a place. 

I loved that summer course, but at the time it was hard for me to untangle my interest in field science from the general feeling of satisfaction that two of my best friends and I had engineered a way to spend the summer together, mostly outdoors, while our parents thought we were being “productive.” None of us became marine biologists. We stayed in touch with our teacher though, and in March he emailed me to say that he had a current student working on an independent project on shark, seal, and human interactions in the Cape Cod waters. This student was writing an op-ed for the Cape Cod Times, and would I mind reading it over and offering feedback? This is how I learned about the proposed seal cull, a scheme to reduce the food supply (and thus the local populations) of great white sharks. By "simply" re-writing the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the seal cull would supposedly reduce shark attacks on the Cape. (The op-ed was published in April, by the way, and I think Emma did a great job!) 

I had mostly forgotten about those spring emails and Emma’s op-ed until I began listening to Outside/In’s episode “Cold, Dark, and Sharky.” Again, I had the feeling that I possessed Cape-specific expertise that I hadn't fully appreciated, only this time it was about sharks, seal culls, and the author of Jaws. Outside/In is a podcast produced by NHPR and the Cape Cod episode dropped the day before The Boston Globe published “At the Edge of a Warming World”, but I didn’t start listening until the day I taught the Globe’s documentary short in class. When I started playing "Cold, Dark, and Sharky" on my walk back to the T after teaching I couldn’t believe the serendipitous connection — I had just spent a week re-writing my syllabus and crafting a lesson plan around climate change on Cape Cod and now I was basking in the glow of a well-taught class and listening to a new extremely well-produced story about Cape Cod. 

I have another ecological connection to the Cape. My senior year of college, I took a two-semester biology seminar called Biological Conservation on Cape Cod and the Islands. The seminar was taught by a postdoc (I haven't read this PNAS paper, but I agree that postdocs are stellar mentors). I enrolled because my major (Environmental Science and Public Policy) was biology-adjacent, my friend wanted to take it and I’d already bailed on a different seminar with her*, and there would be field trips.

This seminar taught me how to read a scientific paper (laying the foundation for #365papers, one Wednesday night meeting at a time), how to core a tree, prep the core, and measure the rings with meticulous, old school — we’re talking dissecting scope and ruler-style — precision. I learned about paleoecology and palynology and the glacial geology lessons that I’d first encountered in my high school marine biology lesson slowly resurfaced. It took another decade, but eventually I did become a paleoecologist. But first, I’d reunite with the postdoc who taught that seminar; he became a professor at Emerson College. He hired me as an affiliated faculty to teach Climate Change in 2014 while I worked on my dissertation. I returned to teach Climate Change again this fall, adding Cape Cod to the syllabus.

Looking back, it appears that Cape Cod is the landscape that circuitously led me to Emerson — and perhaps my entire career? — in the first place. Reading “At the Edge of a Warming World” and listening to “Cold, Dark, and Sharky” back-to-back has been an incredible experience. There are few more nostalgia-inducing moments than teaching your first field sites to the next generation of students. But, to be able to teach with science journalism that is so deep, so well-researched, and so beautifully produced is a whole new level of nostalgia. All the emotions associated with your place are heightened and replayed in hi-fi.

The Boston Globe and Outside/In took the landscape of the Cape and the thorny, tangled relationships between people and nature in this place, and brought it all to life. I found myself remembering an esker where I ate a half-stale muffin from the bottom of my backpack, the tourist trap in Provincetown where I got a henna tattoo of the sun on my shoulder, the bakery where we stopped on the way to the ferry to core dwarf beech trees, the low light in the New Bedford whaling museum and the bright sand dunes outside.

When I tell my origin story about how I became an ecologist, I usually talk about hiking in New Hampshire, or the childhood trip when my grandparents took me to Acadia**. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned Cape Cod in those conversations. Clearly, I need to fact check my own origin story. I’m too completely in the choir to be the target audience for either “At the Edge of a Warming World” or “Cold, Dark, and Sharky”. In other words, I wasn’t surprised by the reporting; I was already familiar with most of the science in both stories. I had heard that you could earn a dollar per nose during the seal bounty days, understood that the waters around Cape Cod are warming faster than 99% of the rest of the ocean, knew that climate change made Nor’easters more powerful. But, I recognize that I am a weird case — the occasional academic Cape Cod enthusiast who has apparently forgotten, or maybe just never appreciated, the instrumental role of the Cape landscape in her scientific training. The power of the storytelling was so apparent when my students talked about their reactions to “At the Edge of a Warming World”.

The Boston Globe and Outside/In took these semi-familiar landscapes and crafted these stories that allowed me to see the Cape again from new perspectives. To have your original field site professionally science communicated back to you — twice! — is a really wonderful and jarring experience. I already appreciated the hard work of science communication in general, but these two stories impressed me in super-specific, place-based, deeply authentic ways. Read and listen to them — and support your own local science journalists. They may just help you re-write your CV. 

*I very much regret bailing on the other seminar — it was taught by Amitav Ghosh, and the Ibis Trilogy later became my three favorite books. My friend took both seminars; I totally could have double-seminar-ed too. Sorry, Rachel! You were right! 

**The summer after my grandparents took me to Acadia, they rented a house in Hyannis for week and what I'm learning from writing this post is that my grandmother spent my childhood picking out future field sites for me.

Writing and Publishing: Mentos, Manatees, and Sinkholes

I’ve been reflecting on my own writing. Today, I picked up three bound booklets from my local copy shop. These are the ‘after’ picture of my PhD dissertation — the pdfs of the peer-reviewed papers that grew out of my ‘before’ dissertation chapters. The volume is sleeker than my official hardcover ProQuest dissertation copy, the figures are more refined, and the writing inside is much better.

I was so excited to share this news that I lost control of grammar and hit ‘send tweet’ with this: “Just picked up bound copies of my PhD’s final outputs for my and my mentors — the four peer-reviewed papers that came out of my dissertation chapters!” which I quickly followed with “**me and my mentors? Or myself and my mentors? I guess my typo split the difference?” My former labmate, Dr. Amanda Gallinat, shot back the brilliant response: “My mentos and their manatee*”

My dissertation was fine — I graduated! — but I am so proud of these papers and I appreciate how much work my mentors (my mentos) put into the polishing the writer (me, their manatee) in the years before and after I graduated. I am thinking in this framing — about my luck as a well-polished manatee — because I just read Stephen Heard’s blog post ‘Edit to polish the writing, or edit to polish the writer?’ Heard talks about the evolution of his feedback to early career writers, from full on track-changes to more restrained, but open-ended comments. He writes, “I now try to explain what writing problem I see and suggest fixes that the ECR might choose to pursue – that is, my intent is to edit to polish the writer, rather than to polish the writing.”

Last year I had the honor of serving as an advisor for a senior capstone project, supervising a student while she wrote the equivalent of a senior thesis. Her final paper was outstanding. Over the summer, we began revising that paper for submission to a conservation journal. Looking back, I recognize the tension I felt between polishing my student and polishing our paper. At the time, I didn’t have the framework to explain this feeling — Heard captures it with beautiful simplicity — but I remember the effort of reigning in my copyediting instincts. This student and I spent a few days together in July when I visited the research station where she was working on a field crew. I was fresh off of sending in proofs for my last dissertation chapter manuscript, and it seemed very important to step out of the mindset where I was the manatee, and shift into the role of being her mento on this paper. The adjustment was both imperceptible and enormous.* 

My sleek, beautifully bound booklet of dissertation papers is less homogenous than my original dissertation. Without an introduction and conclusion, it’s still fairly cohesive — the first three papers are centered on Acadia National Park and clearly riff on each other’s datasets. But, there is a visible shift from paper to paper. The American Journal of Botany has columns, Rhodora does not; Ecosphere has a smaller font size than Northeastern Naturalist. When I place my booklet next to my dissertation, the inconsistencies in formatting are striking. Intriguingly, PLoS ONE just published ‘Scientific sinkhole: The pernicious price of formatting,’ a paper that quantifies the cost associated with formatting research papers for publication in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Allana LeBlanc and her coauthors surveyed research scientists on the time they invested in their manuscripts outside of analysis, writing, and editing — in other words, how long did they spend formatting the body of the manuscript, figures, tables, supplementary files, and references? LeBlanc concludes, “our results suggest that each manuscript costs 14 hours, or US$477 to format for publication in a peer reviewed journal. This represented a loss of 52 hours or a cost of US$1908 per person-year.”

While I agree that re-formatting a manuscript for a new journal is a pain (the researchers in LeBlanc’s survey reported that their manuscripts required a median of two attempts per accepted paper), I’m not sure that all 52 hours are a ‘sinkhole.’ The first 14 hours — the original formatting — won’t completely disappear even if journals adopt more open formatting standards. Maybe there will be less stress associated with meeting the approved journal abbreviations in your literature cited section or table dimensions, but you will still need to generate a literature cited section and you will still need to create the table. I’m not arguing that we keep arcane formatting rules — how is there not yet a common app of manuscript submissions?! — just that we acknowledge the non-writing hours that will always be required in manuscript preparation. Especially since, as we become the mentos, it’s likely our manatees will be the ones engaged in the frustrating work of formatting the manuscripts we helped them to polish. 

And finally, I wanted to mention some lovely science writing advice for all the mentos and their manatees. In the Nature Career Column last week Van Savage and Pamela Yeh compiled the generous advice that they have received from a Pulitzer-prize winning writer. ‘Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper,’ is a powerhouse advice paper. I especially love: “Dashes should emphasize the clauses you consider most important — without using bold or italics — and not only for defining terms. (Parentheses can present clauses more quietly and gently than commas.) Don’t lean on semicolons as a crutch to join loosely linked ideas. This only encourages bad writing.” I’m a big fan of dashes — I love them more than I love absurd manatee riffs — and I'm working on my semicolon crutches. 

McCarthy’s last tip is to “try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like.” I look at my booklet of PhD papers and I like these papers. The heart-swelling pride that I feel holding them all at once is part spite — I published new research about the impacts of climate change in a national park during the Trump Administration** — but also a recognition of personal and professional growth. These papers are the best version of my dissertation chapters. My mentos and their manatee did that — we took a decent dissertation and produced four really great peer-reviewed papers. It feels good. 

*This code-switching between mentos and manatees could be, I think, one of Meghan Duffy's less obvious signs of reaching a new career stage. My whole post-doc has been this mash up of mentoring and being mentored that seems to shift from day to day. Britney Spears can relate.

**I explored the angst and intensity around publishing climate change research in 2018 last year. Writing about Castillo Vardaro's research on pikas in the Rocky Mountains, I said "we both finished our dissertation field work in National Parks before the 2016 election. Her work could inform whether pikas are listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act; my research supported a climate change vulnerability assessment; and after our halcyon days as PhD students under the Obama administration, we are now watching an administration and Secretary of the Interior generally disregard the National Park Service expertise on these issues. I told Castillo Vardaro that I feel an extra sense of urgency in publishing my Acadia papers now — especially in open access venues. I wondered if this was a personal quirk or if she felt a similar sense of responsibility for her field sites and study species." 

References:

Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper. Nature Career Column. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02918-5

LeBlanc AG, Barnes JD, Saunders TJ, Tremblay MS, Chaput J-P (2019) Scientific sinkhole: The pernicious price of formatting. PLoS ONE 14(9): e0223116. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223116 

Drawn to Learning

This post is a short attempt to peel back the curtain on my “bad at pollen” process.

Since my very first pollen clinic in the BEAST Lab at University of Maine I’ve been instructed to sketch the pollen as I see it on reference slides and create my own kind of visual library. This approach makes sense — I remember drawing carex perigynia and fern pinnae in my first field botany course, filling my Rite-in-the-Rain notebook with pages of half-erased sepals and efforts to capture anther angles.

I’m not a practicing sketch-book type of scientist — my field books from my PhD research are mostly long tables dotted with squashed mosquitos and lists of taxa — but I don’t vehemently claim that “I just can't draw”. When I was a master’s student, I took at print-making class at Burlington City Arts and got off campus and out of my head for a couple hours each week. I couldn’t completely stop thinking about my research, but I could redirect that energy towards creating screen prints of my study species. I poured over my photographs from my field season and sketched each of the six flowers over and over again.After I graduated, and moved to Chicago, I took a class at the Lillstreet Art Center and did it again — creating a new alpine plant screen from a new series of sketches of the same six species.

But, I knew those plants (even if, as it turns out, our volunteers maybe didn’t know them?), and drawing familiar flowers repeatedly is perhaps a different game from sketching pollen grains and lining the margins with notes like “cute tennis ball” (Fraxinus) and “I think this is a margo” (Acer).

A recent paper in Journal of Biological Education reinforces the idea that drawing plants — or in my case, pollen — can help us develop botanical knowledge. The paper, “A comparison of descriptive writing and drawing of plants for the development of adult novices’ botanical knowledge,” presents a case study that supports the sketch-to-learn model, or at least the sketch-to-better-capture-the-details-in-your-notes model. Drs. Bethan C. Stagg and Michael F. Verde led half-day wildflower events where students filled notebooks with either descriptive writing or labelled drawing for a suite of plants. Later, the students were given an identification test (labeling plants from the learning activities with their common name or noting ‘look-alike’ for trick question species that were not a part of the learning activities) and a morphology test (true/false questions about diagnostic characters of the study species).

These were all self-described novice botanists — “the event announcement stated that participants should not be able to identify more than twenty common native plants.” The writers and drawers scored equally well on the tests, but Stagg and Verde found that the sketches captured more recognizable diagnostic characters for each species than the written descriptions.

“Drawing in biology develops students’ observational skills by engaging the learner in close, detailed study of the focal organism,” Stagg and Verde write in the Introduction. They reel off a list of citations, but this connection between drawing and observing in biology has a long tradition in natural history training. In the classic essay “Look at Your Fish,” a prospective entomology student joins Louis Agassiz’s lab in the 19th century and is given a jarred haemulon fish specimen and instructed to study it.

Slowly I drew forth that hideous fish, and with a feeling of desperation again looked at it. I might not use a magnifying glass; instruments of all kinds were interdicted. My two hands, my two eyes, and the fish: it seemed a most limited field. I pushed my finger down its throat to feel how sharp the teeth were. I began to count the scales in the different rows until I was convinced that that was nonsense. At last a happy thought struck me—I would draw the fish, and now with surprise, I began to discover new features in the creature. Just then the professor returned."That is right," said he; "a pencil is one of the best of eyes."

Ultimately the student spends three days observing this fish and sporadically fielding questions from Professor Agassiz in what sounds like one of the most stressful and bewildering orientation exercises. Agassiz is never satisfied and leaves every interaction cryptically instructing him to “look at your fish” before disappearing for an unspecified period of time.

The pedagogical style is outdated, kind of. While none of my PIs pulled a straight Agassiz on me, the essay has been assigned as a reading in natural history courses twice in my career.

My fish is a box of pollen slides. But my fish is also a stack of literature, palynology and conservation paleobiology papers in a field where I am very much still sketching the outlines and learning the vocabulary. Is it possible to bring that pencil-is-one-of-the-best-of-eyes attention to detail to reading indoors instead of botanizing outdoors or pollen-counting under a microscope?

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

She tweeted, “I'm going to do quick TLDRs for the articles I read~!” and posted a handwritten summary of the 2003 paper Keeping the Academics in Service Learning Projects, or Teaching Environmental History to Tree Planters with an illustration of a student sitting by a freshly-planted seedling asking “What did I just do + what does it mean?” Liz usually creates artwork that centers the prairie plants she studies, but here, she's sharing digital sketches of the academic literature. She beautifully distills the papers into these concise take-away nuggets framed by her simple, striking art. Each TLDR page is inviting and memorable —and the process creates so much more meaning than my haphazardly highlighted pdf pages and marginalia from my folder of #365papers.

I love exploring prairie ecosystems through Kozik’s eyes, but now I can’t wait to see more of her TLDR and follow her reading! To circle back, I’ve been trying to apply Stagg and Verde’s advice to my pollen sketches — “Participants were encouraged to be undeterred by drawing ability or botanical knowledge and were advised to create their own terms for unknown morphological features.” I’m not quite at the level of sketching paleoecology papers, but my “light freckles, three-cornered popcorn kernel” is slowly becoming “surface psilate, exine indistinctly tectate, sub-triangular to spherical, pores aspidate.” 

Reference:

Stagg, B. C., & Verde, M. F. (2018). A comparison of descriptive writing and drawing of plants for the development of adult novices’ botanical knowledge. Journal of Biological Education, 28(2), 1–16. http://doi.org/10.1080/00219266.2017.1420683

Learn Again

I’m in the middle — the frustrating, slow, and muddy middle — of learning how to be bad at science. How to be bad at one very specific part of a subdiscipline of a scientific field that I love, in theory, but currently suck at. On my CV I’ve worked very hard to present myself as someone who is good at science. I am, academically, good on paper: I’ve got the advanced degrees to prove it. I’ve been a “fellow” more than once. And while I wasn’t born, Athena-style, a fully-formed botanist, I don’t remember the beginning, the part of my education where I learned how to be bad at plants.

I think my plant ecology skills were honed so slowly — from gardening with my mom as a kid, hiking at summer camp, working in outdoor education in college — that I became good at plants imperceptibly, and by the time I took a field botany course in grad school, the taxonomy and morphology were at least familiar, if not already labeled correctly, in my mental map.

I grounded my PhD research in field sites that supported the same plant communities I studied as a master’s student. When I began, I bought a new field guide, but I honestly could have just carried the old dichotomous keys across state lines. And then I decided to become a paleoecologist. 

There are 99 glass slides of pollen in a box that represent my postdoc work. They cover 408 cm of sediment from the bottom of a pond in Acadia National Park. As a PhD student, I spent four years monitoring the plants on the ridge above this pond — I know every stem that grows there now; the slides should tell me what used to grow there, the pollen like a fingerprint of past vegetation communities. If you gave me the lace of veins left behind from a decomposing leaf on that ridge, if you handed me an empty fruit stalk, I could identify the plant to species, almost carelessly. But when I look at my slides, I feel like I am drowning in unknowns.

Under the microscope, my plants become anonymous. Pollen, it turns out, is not intrinsically identifiable. When I look at a birch tree, for example, I don’t need to think about how to parse it, the identification is reflexive. When I look at birch pollen, I see shapes, kind of rounded-triangles or triangular-balls, with nubbins at the corners, and nothing about it screams birch. Not yet. 

I am 35, and I am a beginner, learning plants again and for the first time. I say for the first time because last time around, I was not cognizant of the learning process. I didn’t know I was ever bad at plants. But I am definitely bad at pollen. 

Pollen is humbling me. I’m learning how to tell tricolpate grains from tricolporate grains, making Pinus v Picea lists to remember which one has an indistinct transition zone between its rugulate bladders and stippled body, and assigning the keys on my keyboard in the program PolyCounter, so that when I tap ‘k’ it counts one Fagus. But, I’m also learning how to inhabit this research: when is my best time to count pollen, how do I increase my daily hours at the microscope without burning out, and when I see improvement in how quickly I count a slide, how do I know if I’m getting better at pollen, or just getting sloppy. I’m still so bad at pollen, that I don’t know the difference between feeling genuinely stuck on a hard identification or just seeing a common grain from an uncommon angle. It’s hard to see a way out. 

I’ve been bad at pollen for a couple months now. I was so afraid of being bad, so stuck in this feeling, that I stalled in the learning phase. I stuck to my box of reference slides — each one a simple collection of a single pollen type, labelled with the genus or species it holds — and tentatively shuffled through. When I would peek at a real slide, a slide from my project, the chaos of unknowns would overwhelm me. I dragged my feet; I didn’t feel qualified to start counting. I knew that I would, someday, probably be good at pollen because at some point in the future the 99 slides would be identified and counted, I just didn’t feel connected to that process. 

I still haven’t gracefully learned how to be bad at science. But, I have started collecting advice, and noticing my stumbling blocks, and I think that eventually these reflections will help me empathize with students in a way that I couldn’t before because I didn’t know what it felt like to be bad at plants.

I love the Tall Heights song, Learn Again. Full disclosure: I knew those guys in high school, and so I might have been there in the study halls in the song. However, high school me was probably dutifully doing her homework, and generally learning how to be good at academic things and would not have identified with the lyrics on this level. Postdoc me is all about learning again. Occasionally I rewrite the lyrics and sing them to my pollen. “Sometimes I forget to do, the things that paleoecologists do…” 

The most meaningful advice I’ve found about being bad at something you love is from Ira Glass. I didn’t go to high school with Ira Glass and so this is slightly less personal, and on top of that he is speaking to creatives, and not necessarily scientists, but this resonates. This American Life superfans can listen to this recording of Ira's advice; it's slightly different from the quote as transcribed on GoodReads (below):

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

My pollen is my story here. And I just need to start counting pollen. And if I have to come back and recount the first five or ten slides, the first twenty slides, I will do that. I will fight my way through. I will learn again how to be bad, so that I can eventually become not a static good, but a growing better. 

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 

Book Review: The Lady from the Black Lagoon

In 1953, ichthyologist Kay Lawrence joined a research expedition searching for fossils in the Amazon Basin. This was the same year that Rosalind Franklin left King’s College in London, after she created the X-ray diffraction image of DNA that was shown to Watson and Crick without her approval or knowledge. Lawrence was the only woman in a team of five scientists, and the only one without a PhD, or at least the only one who was not referred to as “Dr.” in the publicity materials for the expedition. Her fieldwork hit some snags — not the least of which was a foreboding black lagoon and an amphibious monster that fell in love with her and her extremely scientific white bathing suit.

Yes — Kay is actress Julia Adams and the amphibious monster is the Creature from the Black Lagoon. But there’s also a Rosalind Franklin figure in Creature from the Black Lagoon, and like Franklin, her contributions were obscured, overshadowed, and openly questioned for decades. Mallory O’Meara brings the story of Milicent Patrick, the makeup artist and special effects designer behind the Creature, to life in a fun and funny new biography, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick.

O’Meara grew up loving horror films and she was over the moon when she learned that her favorite movie monster, the Creature, was designed by a woman named Milicent Patrick. The world of horror is dominated by men, and so even though O’Meara only knew the barest details, she clung to Patrick as a patron saint of representation. In her introduction, O’Meara writes:

“Milicent was holding a door open for me that I never realized I had considered closed. Come on, she said. We belong here, too. I accepted her invitation. I make monster movies for a living. I produce them, I write them. Over the years, I searched for information, for anything that could tell me more about her. For all of my adult life and film career, Milicent Patrick has been a guiding light, a silent friend, a beacon reminding me that I belonged.”

O’Meara’s book is wonderful and engaging. She pieces together the lost legacy of her horror icon and takes the reader along on the research journey. I listened to the audiobook and fell in love with O’Meara’s voice which is somehow both welcoming and acerbic, irreverent and admiring. And, from the beginning, I was struck by how well the world of science mapped onto The Lady from the Black Lagoon’s world of science fiction. The story of why Milicent Patrick’s legacy was lost turns out to be completely banal, standard issue sexism and O’Meara deftly places this history in the context of the #MeToo movement.

“So many women share this experience, women in every profession. We’re ignored, sexually harassed, talked down to, plagiarized and insulted in and out of the workplace. It’s worse if you’re a woman of color, a queer woman, a disable woman, a transwoman and worse still if you’re a combination of any of these. I don’t know a single woman working in my field, or any creative field, or any field at all, who cannot relate to Milicent Patrick. It’s not just her story. It’s mine, too.”

I love O’Meara's description of Patrick’s process during the design of the Creature: “for inspiration, Milicent researched prehistoric animals: reptiles, amphibians, fish. She specifically looked for illustrations of animals from the Devonian period, which is when the Creature claw fossil in the film is from. The Devonian period, about four hundred million years ago, was the time period when life began to adapt to dry land from the sea. She spent weeks sketching out designs.” I had no idea The Creature from the Black Lagoon built a myth from this core kernel of scientific truth. Aside from this deep dive into a specific monster origin story, O’Meara’s book is not a science story*. But, I spent much of the book’s treatment of women in the film industry thinking about women in STEM.

When O’Meara compares Patrick’s Hollywood to her own experiences in film in the 21st century, the resemblance of these narratives to the past and present in STEM fields is eerie. O’Meara began her project because the idea of Milicent Patrick — a woman working behind the scenes in horror films — embodied such an important possibility to her in a field where otherwise she did not see herself represented. But, as she uncovered uncomfortable truths about Patrick as a person, she had to grapple with how to portray an imperfect personal hero. “The problem with being the only woman to ever do something is that you have to be perfect,” she laments. “When I found out about her as a teenager, I thought that for Milicent to be the first and only woman to ever design a famous monster, to be one of the first female animators, she had to be superhuman. She had to have been better than any other woman who ever wanted to design a monster. She had to have been the only one worthy enough to enter that boys’ club. This way of thinking is a mal-adaptation women have developed over the years to be able to deal with the fact that we’re getting passed on for jobs because we’re female. You force yourself to believe that there just haven’t been any women good enough for the job, rather than accept the fact that the entire system just doesn’t want you in it.” This is the hip, feminist-forward biographer’s way of saying that the water is not responsible for fixing the leaky pipeline.

I have my own Milicent Patrick, only her name is Annie Sawyer Downs. She left behind just enough of a scientific legacy that I’m awed by her botanical prowess and totally frustrated by the blanks in her life story. Like O’Meara, I’ve considered this woman to be “a guiding light, a silent friend, a beacon reminding me that I belonged.” O’Meara opens her book with the story of her Milicent Patrick tattoo — and, even before you read Chapter 1, you see the beautiful cover art for the book, which was created by her tattoo artist. On the Literary Disco podcast in March O’Meara explained: “When you get a tattoo of someone, you become a sort of information kiosk.” O’Meara later describes an exchange with a librarian at USC’s Cinematic Arts Library: “I even sheepishly rolled up my left sleeve to show him the tattoo of Milicent and the Creature. I’m so deeply invested in this project that asking me about it is like asking a new parent to show you pictures of their baby.”

I don’t have a tattoo of Annie Sawyer Downs, but I did name my kid after her. Asking me to show you pictures of my baby is literally asking me to dive into the story of my Milicent Patrick. I loved following O’Meara’s journey as she tracked down the pieces of Patrick’s life because I’ve done that too — I finagled an invitation to the Maine summer house that Annie Sawyer Downs’ built, I found her herbarium specimens at Harvard, I read through her collaborator’s field notes and could not help but notice that after she mentored him for the better part of a decade he went on to found a botanical club that did not admit women as members. I’m so happy that O’Meara got to write the book on Patrick — and I really did love this book — but I found the whole experience of listening to it to be bittersweet, and not just because the misogyny that ended Patrick’s career still hangs over Hollywood — and everywhere else. It was bittersweet for me to watch someone else find their Annie Sawyer Downs, tie up the loose ends, and bring a full story to light because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that for Annie. Annie died almost a century before Milicent Patrick, her trail is colder, her work is less renowned, there is no cult following of Rhododendron canadense forma albiflora like there is for the Creature**. And, as much as I feel Annie deserves a book like The Lady from the Black Lagoon, I know there are countless fully erased BIWOC in my field who didn’t even get to leave behind a name, let alone a trail of breadcrumbs, for future historians to follow. And so, once again Milicent Patrick is a kind of singular woman — a stand in for a whole suite of women who have given the faintest glimmer of representation to my generation, a small hope that we could see ourselves in them, even if we couldn’t read their full story in a book or Wikipedia page. Maybe I can’t have that for Annie, but I’d love to read the story of another ecologist’s Milicent Patrick figure next — write that book and/or send me your recommendation!  

*Still, some science creeps in to the science fiction, for example in O’Meara’s footnote on page 19: “Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983. Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Directory in 2010, the first and only. Sixty women have been to space. It’s harder for women to get into Hollywood than it is for us to get to space.”

**There definitely should be more botanical cult classics.

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

How to Write About the Science You (and Others) Did

I bought Stephen B. Heard’s The Scientist’s Guide to Writing at ESA in 2016. I was a soon-to-be sixth year PhD student with one publication (my master’s thesis) and zero written dissertation chapters. Maybe not exactly zero — there were chunks of methods paragraphs from grant proposals, and a super-rough-draft of chapter 1 shared with collaborators from another university — but close enough that my plans to defend in the spring were borderline comical. I needed writing advice and a structured plan: The Scientist’s Guide to Writing was my magical guidebook, my used Potions textbook annotated by the Half-Blood Prince. I read it methodically, one chapter at a time, and it worked — by March I had four chapters and a viable defense date. I received other lucky breaks besides the perfect reading material: a postdoc fellowship provided motivation to finish the PhD, my parents hosted a writing retreat for my last chapter; there were awesome babysitters, baristas who slipped me extra shots of espresso, and committee members who provided prompt and constructive feedback along the way. But, I still turn to reading when I need help writing.

Earlier this month I covered my favorite new advice papers on How to Do the Science. This week — my favorite recent papers on How to Write About the Science You (and Others) Did: Dr. Scott Hotaling’s Publishing papers while keeping everything in balance: Practical advice for a productive graduate school experience and Dr. Emma Sayer’s The anatomy of an excellent review paper. I like the contrasting perspectives here: Hotaling as a newly minted PhD explains the context for getting the writing done — creating a habit of writing and organizing tasks — while Sayer provides critical advice for the writing that must be accomplished once you have achieved Hotaling’s headspace and you are deep into drafting a review paper. Hotaling’s system will get you to the desk; Sayer’s will polish the word document that’s languishing in your Review Paper file.

Hotaling’s Publishing papers while keeping everything in balance: Practical advice for a productive graduate school experience began as an informal pep talk: he was a postdoc with a good publishing record and grad students in his new department turned to him for advice. “I realized that, like me in graduate school, the students knew they needed to be writing papers (or their thesis) but they didn’t know where to start from a practical standpoint,” he explains. “So, I decided to write down my approach to working to at least give students a jumping off point. When I started looking in the literature, I realized that much of the existing advice came for more senior academics and was often much more cynical than I felt was necessary. Ultimately, I felt I could fill a need by offering my own positive, but realistic, take on how to be productive in graduate school. Once I began writing it, I realized that it should really be a more holistic perspective with advice for being productive mixed with good practices for developing (and maintaining!) collaborations, taking care of your mental health, etc.”

Though Hotaling offers advice that seems more universal and traditional (journals have been publishing writing advice to grad students for a long time) than how to do urban ecology work on private property, I wondered if he ran into the same resistance (3x rejected) from journal editors that Dyson had experienced. “It was difficult!” Hotaling agreed. “I reached out to a number of journal editors and received replies that varied from encouraging rejections to one editor who essentially asked why I wasted my time writing something so useless. Ideas in Ecology & Evolution was the first journal I formally submitted the manuscript to and it wound up being a great home for it.”

Sayer’s advice paper zooms in on writing an excellent review paper. She wrote to me: “To give you a bit of background – I’m a big advocate for the importance of effective science communication. I do a lot of work with early-career researchers on presenting science in various formats to different audiences.” Sayer’s advice paper is built on a deep history of this work. “I started creating guides for the British Ecological Society when I was a postdoc – I’ve written guides on giving talks at conferences and designing science posters (the latter is now used as the society’s guidelines). Within a couple of years of starting my own research group, I had students and postdocs from 7 different countries and many of them struggled with the same aspects of science writing. I compiled a short guide for them, which turned into The British Ecological Society Short Guide to Scientific Writing (and will be published formally in Functional Ecology this year). In the meantime, I had taken on the role of reviews editor for Functional Ecology. Based on the success of the “Short Guide” and my experience in handling review papers from different subdisciplines, the other editors asked if I would try to write a guide for review papers...”

Most of the authors I talked with for this blog post wrote their advice papers as grad students — they were writing the paper they wanted to read early in their careers — but Sayer writes from a more established point in her career. I asked if she thought writing review papers is just a topic that requires more experience. “In this case, yes, having greater experience certainly helped. I’ve always preferred reviews that synthesise information and create something new from the published literature, but it wasn’t until I became Reviews Editor for Functional Ecology that I realised how useful a set of guidelines would be. We learn to summarise information but synthesising it is much harder and is quite an abstract concept to explain to someone.” I too have noticed this steep learning curve between being able to summarize the literature, and being able to add something to the conversation. I first read the short and sweet (three pages!) The anatomy of an excellent review paper early in the group-writing phase of my own review paper (Berend et al. 2019, accepted!). I found myself returning to our google doc with new eyes (which, in an inside joke to myself, I named “Box 1-tinted glasses”) and re-structured our outline around central concepts.

In Part 1 of this series Dr. Ziter had reflected, “I started out thinking this is the paper I wish I had been able to read as a graduate student, and of course by the time the paper came out I was starting my own lab, so now I think I'm so excited that MY grad students will be able to read this before they start fieldwork.” Similarly, Sayer wrote The anatomy of an excellent review paper from the perspective of a PI reminiscing on resources she wished she could have had earlier. “I initially wrote the Short Guide to Scientific Writing for my research group – partly because it described the kind of research papers I wanted to read, but also because I would have loved something like that when I started writing.”

Both Hotaling and Sayer felt that the peer-review process added value and reach to their advice. Hotaling writes, “I chose to publish it as a peer-reviewed paper for two reasons. First, I wanted reviewer input on the paper. I received extensive feedback from my lab and academic friends, but it was important that it also be reviewed by people outside of my day-to-day sphere. It’s a very a personal paper and I needed to know that people who didn’t know me personally still found value in the paper. I’d like to add that the reviewers of the paper (Drs. Meryl Mims and Robert Denton) were exceptional and their feedback greatly strengthened the final paper. And second, from a more practical perspective, it was better for my own career that it be published as a peer-reviewed article.” Sayer echoes, “First and foremost, [peer review] ensures quality – the content has been scrutinised and improved in response to feedback, which gives the reader more confidence in the advice. Then there’s the question of recognition – a lot of work goes into writing guidelines, and thousands of authors have downloaded the paper. It may not attract citations, but it’s still important that the contribution is acknowledged. Last but not least, publishing guidelines as a peer-reviewed paper or editorial makes them much easier to find.”

Since Sayer’s advice emphasizes how to structure a paper, I asked if she had leaned on other advice papers for guidance on structure or tone — essentially, what peer-reviewed advice influenced her presentation of peer-reviewed advice. “There are quite a few papers about writing reviews in other subject areas that I cited in the guidelines.” Here, I need to point out that the short references section in Sayer’s paper is an excellent resource for nerds like me that strive to read their way into better writing. Sayer notes that all of the references contain great advice, but no single paper contained all the information she wanted — that’s why she wrote hers! Her own favorite/favourite advice paper is subject-specific: “I give all my students the 1991 paper by Eberhardt and Thomas on Designing Environmental Field Studies (Ecological Monographs 61:53-73) – it gives a great overview of experimental design and introduces lots of important considerations for developing field work. My other favourite is a book, rather than a paper, but it’s a great read and incredibly useful for communicating research: Made to Stick by Heath and Heath (Random House).”

I asked Hotaling about his favorite advice papers too. We have similar learning styles — he says, “I read a lot of similar papers while writing my own. I particular enjoyed John Smol’s 2016 Some advice to early career scientists: Personal perspectives on surviving in a complex world for its clear, conversational perspective and that paper was a big reason why I ultimately submitted my article to the same journal (Ideas in Ecology and Evolution). Beyond academia, I also drew inspiration from Stephen King’s 2000 memoir “On Writing” and specifically his approach to a regular, ritualistic writing routine. If there’s one takeaway from my paper that I hope early career scientists will try out, it would be developing a regular, daily writing habitat. It’s staggering what such a simple practice can yield in terms of productivity and, at least for me, satisfaction with my work. By writing every day, I feel far less stressed about finishing things and more able to balance my work and life in a healthy way.”

I’m drawn to advice papers, in part, because they can ameliorate imposter syndrome; they say, of course you don’t know this yet, but here, I have given you a guide and you can quietly take this pdf to your favorite chair, curl up with a mug of tea, and have an introvert’s field day. Good advice papers can be a kind of pensieve — the instrument in Dumbledore’s office that allowed wizards in Harry Potter to share their memories, and immerse themselves in each others' past experiences. I love these particular pensieves and the stories behind their publication — thank you so much to Drs. Dyson, Ziter, Broman, Hotaling, and Sayer! 

References:

Sayer, E. J. (2018). The anatomy of an excellent review paper. Functional Ecology, 32(10), 2278–2281. http://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.13207

Hotaling, S. (2018). Publishing papers while keeping everything in balance: Practical advice for a productive graduate school experience. Ideas in Ecology and Evolution, 11, 1–12. http://doi.org/10.4033/iee.2018.11.5.f

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

I remember feeling a spark of urgent curiosity when I found a copy of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten on a shelf in the guest bedroom. I was 11. And though I had made it to middle school, I had never attended kindergarten. This book contained information that I lacked and needed. I hid under the guest bed and read it cover-to-cover.

This character trait — this drive to read my way into knowledge — is still going strong in my life as an early career ecologist. Recently, I turned to Dr. Marieke Frassl’s 2018 Ten simple rules for collaboratively writing a multi-authored paper as I took on a leadership role writing a paper with my postdoc cohort. Reading this guide for collaborative writing gave me a new sense of focus and energized me for the ensuing work of organizing notes, framing our paper, and planning for an upcoming writing retreat.

I’m a reader, and so it shouldn’t be surprising that I seek paper-based advice in the stacks of my #365papers To Read Pile. Reflecting on the helpful scaffolding that I found in Ten simple rules for collaboratively writing a multi-authored paper, I pulled out my favorite Advice Papers from the last year. Flipping through the pdfs, I wondered, Why do we publish advice in journals? Why did these papers, which often echo advice I’ve already received in person or on twitter, resonate so much for me? What does it mean to offer your advice via peer-reviewed papers?

One of the major perks of writing for PLoS Ecology is the opportunity to cold-email scientists (or work-email scientist-friends) and pick their brains about their papers on exploding pollen, unexpected biodiversity hotspots on historic battlefields, and epic fieldwork roadtrips. So, I started writing to the authors of my favorite Advice Papers. This exercise took on a life of its own as Advice authors shared their stories, and their advice, with me. At the same time, I started collaborating on my own Advice Paper with coauthors. The project of selecting the year’s top Advice Papers has expanded beyond my initial curiosity and grown way too long for a single blog post. Here is the first of a two-part series on the best recent Advice Papers in ecology — Part One: How to Do the Science.

The two best papers I read on doing science were Broman and Woo’s 2018 Data Organization in Spreadsheets in The American Statistician and Dyson et al’s 2019 Conducting urban ecology research on private property: advice for new urban ecologists in Journal of Urban Ecology. I ranked Data Organization in Spreadsheets as one of my top-ten Summer 2018 papers, and I continue to stan this lovely guide to foundational data management. While my research is largely National Parks-based and urban ecology on private property seems to fall outside of my wheelhouse, I appreciate the framework for planning urban fieldwork in Dyson’s paper, and my friend Carly Ziter is a coauthor. When the paper came out, Carly tweeted “A few of us ECR urban ecologists got together and wrote the paper we wish we had been able to read before starting private property research.” At the time, I was hip-deep in revisions with a few alpine ECR ecologists on the paper that we wished we had been able to read before starting common garden research. I had to read someone else’s version of the paper they’d wished they’d been able to read and see that this process could be completed. 

Dr. Karen Dyson explained, “During my first (urban) field season I realized very quickly that I had had no idea what I was getting myself into.” She was surprised by the time commitment needed for communicating with private property owners to set up site visits and experienced the gamut of hospitality from having security called on her to being subject to overly-friendly non-stop talkers. “Basic things like bathroom breaks required more planning than you would expect. If I recall correctly, it was this last point that I was commiserating with my co-author Tracy about when the first idea for this paper came about.” Second author Dr. Carly Ziter agreed, “Like Karen, I didn't know many people working on private land when I started my PhD fieldwork, and I really just muddled through it pretty naively.” Private property is an important part of the urban ecological landscape, but the challenges of working on private property mean that urban ecology research is often conducted through remote sensing or from a sidewalk. Dyson wrote, “You’re never going to understand ecology in cities if you don’t engage with people—and not just park administrators, but the individuals who make myriad decisions each day on every parcel about what trees to cut down, what shrubs to plant, etc. All this is critical to furthering the field, and we wanted to see more of it, done well, with sensitivity to the people whose lives we’re intruding on.”

Dyson put together a workshop on the topic for ESA 2016, and Ziter attended. She remembers thinking, “finally, other people who get what this is like!” Dyson interviewed Ziter for the paper, and as Ziter remembers, “at some point, I think I more or less invited myself onto the team (thanks Karen et al!). I started out thinking this is the paper I wish I had been able to read as a graduate student, and of course by the time the paper came out I was starting my own lab, so now I think I'm so excited that MY grad students will be able to read this before they start fieldwork.”

I asked Ziter and Dyson why they decided that this advice needed to be presented in a peer-reviewed paper. Ziter notes that “Urban ecology is growing really quickly right now. And as the field grows, there are more and more students collecting urban data whose advisors/labmates are not trained in urban ecology or urban field methods (e.g. in my case, I was the only urban-focused grad student in my lab). So there isn't that passed-down or institutionalized knowledge present within research groups to help students get started.” And, as Dyson recognizes, “Peer-review is more permanent and has gravitas, and can be cited as a reason for doing something. We also wanted open source, since it’s accessible to those without library connections. Also, this is a serious subject that needs to be treated seriously, and often isn’t… which is also why we interviewed almost 30 people from as many countries as we could and went searching outside the discipline for role models.” There’s definitely some field site pride on the line. Carly explains the exasperation of hearing, “oh you do urban ecology? Your fieldwork must be so easy.” “Really the logistics are often more challenging than working in traditional field sites. So it was personally really rewarding to be able to help Karen and the team articulate in a more formal way that hey, this isn't just in our heads, there really are unique and pervasive challenges inherent in this kind of work (just as there are challenges inherent in more remote field ecology that we don't face!)”

The origin story behind Data Organization in Spreadsheets is a bit different from Dyson’s work to build a coalition dedicated to capturing and publishing best practices for field work on private property. Dr. Karl Broman’s website on organizing data in spreadsheets — “largely a response to a particularly badly organized set of data from a collaborator” — already existed when Jenny Bryan and Hadley Wickham were organizing a special issue on Data Science for the journal The American Statistician. He admits that, “it seemed unnecessary to write an article when I could already point people to the website,” and he backed out of his promise to contribute to the special issue. But, he reports, “Jenny didn't want me to back out and asked several friends if they'd help me to write the article, and Kara Woo agreed to do that and did the bulk of the work of rearranging the content in the form of an article and adding an introduction citing relevant literature.”

The peer review process for Data Organization in Spreadsheets was fairly straightforward. Broman writes, “every article solicited for the issue was assigned two reviewers from among the authors of other articles. The reviews were constructive and helpful. After the review, the article was published at PeerJ Preprints and also formally submitted to American Statistician...American Statistician is paywalled; available to most statisticians but not many others. I paid some huge fee (like $3500) to make it open access, since the target audience for the paper is much broader. I hemmed and hawed about whether to pay to make it OA; the fee seemed way too high, and the material was already available both at PeerJ Preprints and as a website. But I did pay and I'm glad I did, because I think way more people have read the paper, as a consequence of it being free. If people find the paper and it's available, they'll read it, but I think if they get a paywall, they're not likely to look further to find a free version.”

In contrast, the urban ecology peer review process was long and winding, though it also included a PeerJ Preprint. When it was finally published, Dyson shared the journey in a twitter thread. “It was desk rejected from Landscape and Urban Planning and Methods in Ecology and Evolution and rejected after review from Urban Ecosystems.” She remained dedicated to the paper throughout: “Since I ran the workshop at ESA 2016 and a well-attended poster at ESA 2107, we knew there was a need for it among students…We also put it in PeerJ preprints and it was one of the top five read/visited papers of 2018. So despite getting very frustrated with the process, we didn’t really lose faith in the manuscript—though we did give it complete reorganization after the rejection from Urban Ecosystems. We saw Journal of Urban Ecology was doing a free open access as they got started and decided ‘why not?’ since they’d also published Pickett and McDonnell’s The art and science of writing a publishable article. They’ve been lovely throughout the process—and have been great about re-tweeting and promoting the paper. It’s now one of their most read articles.” Here, Ziter chimed in to say, “I should disclose that I am sometimes the thumbs behind that twitter account. So that's why it got good twitter press ;). But I have no other role in the journal decisions or review process - so the rest of the loveliness is on them!”

Finally, I asked Broman and Dyson if they had any favorite Advice Papers. Dyson answered with an enthusiastic “Yes! In general, I love advice papers and papers that compare methodology, so I enjoyed putting this one together and hope to do more!” (I agree — we should write an urban-alpine ecology crossover!). She highlighted, “Hilty and Merenlender’s 2003 paper that deals with many of these issues (though not as in depth) on rural private property… [and] we used a few papers as models when we were writing (and re-writing) our manuscript, including Harrison’s Getting started with meta‐analysis; Goldberg et al’s Critical considerations for the application of environmental DNA methods to detect aquatic species; and particularly Clancy et al’s Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault.”

Broman writes that he didn't seek out any advice papers for guidance/structure while writing Spreadsheets. He muses, “I think the main advice papers I'm familiar with are those "ten tips for ..." [sic] at PLoS Computational Biology, which have been really useful though I think the formula has become a bit grating. I also really like Bill Noble's paper on organizing projects.”

Thanks to Broman, Dyson and Ziter for sharing their advice and adding to my reading list. Both of these papers are well-written and offer tangible, useful advice. I’ve found myself ruminating on them as I plan future fieldwork, and definitely wishing I could have read them much earlier as I wrap up old projects and wrestle with my old data.Stay tuned for Part Two: How to Write About the Science You (and Others) Did.

References:

Dyson, K., Ziter, C., Fuentes, T. L., & Patterson, M. S. (2019). Conducting urban ecology research on private property: advice for new urban ecologists. Journal of Urban Ecology, 5(1), 48–10. http://doi.org/10.1093/jue/juz001

Broman, K. W., & Woo, K. H. (2018). Data Organization in Spreadsheets. The American Statistician, 72(1), 1–10. http://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2017.1375989 

Hiking with Reviewer 2

This is a deep dive into my own research — the backstory behind a single line in a recently published paper and the data-driven trip down memory lane that was spurred by an innocent question from Reviewer 2. 

This research took place on Wabanaki land. I want to respectfully acknowledge the Maliseet, Micmac, Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy tribes, who have stewarded this land throughout the generations. I am certainly not the first person to devote time and energy to tracking seasonal changes on Mount Desert Island. 

This week one of my dissertation chapters, Trails-as-transects: phenology monitoring across heterogeneous microclimates in Acadia National Park, Maine, was published in the journal Ecosphere. In this project, I pulled the space-for-time trick and hiked three mountains repeatedly to collect a lot of phenology observations across diverse microclimates. The mountains in Acadia are not huge — these granite ridges roll up from the Gulf of Maine and top out at 466 m — but my transect hikes were between 4.8 km and 9.7 km each, and I wore out a pair of trail runners each season. I took to heart Richard Nelson’s advice: “There may be more to learn by climbing the same mountain a hundred times than by climbing a hundred different mountains.” 

A couple months ago, in our second round of reviews, Reviewer 2 noted, “I think that it would be useful for those wanting to replicate your transect-as-trails approach (especially land managers) to know approximately how many person hours it took to complete a transect observation, here in the main text or in the appendix.” I had a magnet (which is apparently also available as a coaster) hanging next to my desk in grad school: over a silhouette of a golden retriever with three tennis balls in its mouth, it reads: “If it’s worth doing…it’s worth overdoing.” This magnet perfectly describes my response to Reviewer 2. I sent a back-of-the-envelope estimate to my coauthors, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the precise person hours per transect was a knowable statistic. In addition to my field notes scribbled into weatherproof notebooks, I had collected my data via fulcrum, a smartphone app that automatically recorded the time of each observation. From my cache of fulcrum csv and xlsx files, I should be able to automatically pull the time of the first and last observation of each transect. The 10.7 MB of data in my fulcrum files represented four years of field work, hours and hours on the trails, slogging through rain, snow, and sun, training field assistants, combing through patches of lowbush blueberry and mountain cranberry for the first, hidden open flower.

I became obsessed with the idea of seriously calculating person hours per transect, but I was increasingly convinced that a single number would be meaningless. I also realized that I lacked the coding chops to deal with my messy raw data: 171 files, each with 77 columns, usually containing data from a single transect, but occasionally comprising half a transect (when we had to bail due to weather) or more than one transect (when I ran ambitious double-days, or my field assistants and I split up). I turned to Porzana Solutions, and Auriel Fournier expertly helped me unlock my person hours data.Over 177 the hikes in my fulcrum files, the mean time between first and last observation is 3.51 hours.

Three and a half hours does not even begin to tell the story. This blog post is my second supplemental appendix. Here is the story of person hours per transect — the lead time, the pregnant field season, and the phenology of phenology monitoring. 

Before the first observation and after the last

There is a lead time in every transect hike. After rolling out of bed, pulling on the same old running shorts, race tshirt, and powder blue sunglasses, after packing the same handful of granola bars, dried papaya, and sharp cheddar, zipping my phone into its waterproof case, and slinging my backpack into the passenger seat, after driving to the trailhead and placing my research permit on my dashboard, there’s still a gap between the start of the fieldwork and the first official observation of the day. Especially as the summer crowds began arriving in June, I had to get out early to grab a spot at the limited parking by the north or the south end of Pemetic, or else add some extra miles from a spillover lot*. Even at the best parking spot, the approach to the Sargent South Ridge trailhead requires navigating 0.7 miles of carriage roads between the car and the trail on every hike. When I started the project in 2013, the Sequester kept Park Loop Road closed late into the spring season. For the first six weeks of fieldwork, I walked along the empty road to access Cadillac North Ridge, and Pemetic North and South Ridge.

The transect hikes were 4.8 km (Pemetic), 9.2 km (Cadillac), and 9.7 km (Sargent) up the North Ridge and down the South Ridge or vice versa (all of the mountains had uncreatively named north and south ridge trails). So at the end of a transect, I was 4.8, 9.2, or 9.7 km away from my car. I could run the carriage roads to connect the trailheads after Sargent or Pemetic (a 6.6 km run post-Sargent, and 7.2 km run post-Pemetic). From Cadillac South Ridge, a run up Route 3 to park loop road got me back to the north ridge trailhead in 10 km. Sometimes I arranged rides with friends to skip the run, and when I had funding for field assistants in 2015 and 2016 we often carpooled to drop a car at the finish line for each other. (There were some benefits to this running routine — in 2014 I won free ice cream after placing third in my age group in the Acadia Half Marathon.)

The person hours per transect statistic is limited because not every transect was a straight shot. Sometimes we had to bail 3km into a hike due to bad weather and finish the transect another day. Once, one of my field assistants took a wrong turn and recorded phenology observations on the wrong trail down Pemetic, and so I went back, retraced her steps, and picked up the right trail the next day. Once, I did a wild two-a-day and in the middle of Cadillac, I ran down the Canon Brook Trail, looped through the Pemetic transect, and then ran back up the Cadillac West Face Trail to finish Cadillac. Once, I had a friend in town and we caught a ride to the summit of Cadillac and then enjoyed the leisurely hike down the south ridge with my eight-month-old in the baby backpack.

While the time between first and last observation averaged just over 4 hours for Cadillac, 2.5 hours for Pemetic, and 3 hours and 40 minutes for Sargent, those times discount the bookends of the hikes. As much as I’m railing against the answer to my query here, the process of working with Porzana Solutions to calculate these times has been incredibly rewarding. I feel like I’m getting to know my both raw data and the tidyverse in a weirdly intimate way that goes way beyond a standard tutorial. 

The pregnant field season

In 2015 I was 17 weeks pregnant at the start of my field season. In addition to my daughter, I was also joined in the field by two field assistants. According to the Porzana analysis, I hiked less than half as many transects in 2015 (15) compared to each of the two previous years (2013: 35** hikes, 2014: 37 hikes). I actually hiked 20 transects that year — my assistants were entering the data (and getting credit for the hike in fulcrum) while we hiked together in the beginning of the season***. On my solo transects in 2015, I felt sloooooow. I averaged thirty minutes slower than 2013 and 2014 on Cadillac, 50 minutes slower on Pemetic, and 22 minutes slower on Sargent. On top of this, I was covering less ground — in 2013 and 2014 I had monitored phenology in off-trail Northeast Temperate Network plots near my transects in an effort to compare trail-side phenology with forested sites that was ultimately cut from my dissertation. In 2015, I stuck to the trails.

I remember feeling pretty terrible at the beginning of most hikes that year. I had one favorite spruce tree on the south ridge of Sargent, and I can picture myself looking up through the needles on more than one occasion from my lie-down-spot while I tried to decide if a bite of granola bar would make me feel more or less nauseous. As I climbed above treeline and into the breeze the fog of morning sickness would lift, and as I hiked downhill, my daughter would do this funny little fetus-roll and kick in a way that I interpreted to be happy.

Hiking while pregnant was hard, but it felt easier than grappling with the looming challenges of becoming a parent. I liked the hard of fieldwork, it was the kind of hard that I felt capable of conquering. I also loved being pregnant in Bar Harbor. It was my fifth field season in Acadia and I had this wonderful community of supportive colleagues and mentors at the park service and in town. I had a favorite yoga class, a favorite milkshake, a favorite iced chai and blueberry muffin spot. I also had two field assistants — my pregnancy fortuitously aligned with NSF funding! — and working with Ella and Natasha that season was great. The person hours per transect figure obscures my field assistants, folding us into each other and masking the time we spent training together on the ridges. It also hides my pregnancy in the averages. I want to recognize those extra 22-50 minutes: they were some of the best worst minutes of my PhD.

The phenology of phenology monitoring

The person hours per transect average doesn’t show the sprint finishes of June. I monitored thirty species (the paper highlights the 9 most common taxa) of spring-flowering plants. On the transect hikes, I recorded leaf out and flowering phenology. In April, this was a bit of a scavenger hunt, and I’d pour over thickets of shrub stems for the first sign of bud break, then in May I’d peek into each curled Canada mayflower leaf for flower buds. By early June, my plants had leafed out, and the flowering season was winding down. I knew the trails by heart, and the location of each focal taxa along the ridge was bright in my mental map; each transect became a point-to-point trail run between the last phenological hold outs. Did the rhodora finish flowering on Cadillac? Had the last sheep’s laurel buds opened on Pemetic? Were the blueberries beginning to ripen below Sargent’s summit?

As I followed the spring phenology, I grew faster, my calf muscles more defined, my appetite more voracious. Acadia’s steep climbs will whip you into shape. I remember in 2013 arriving in the field a month after passing my comps and feeling so sluggish after a winter of studying instead of running. In comparison, I ran hard in the winter of 2013-2014, set a personal best half marathon time in a trail race in March, and just cruised through the early season field work in 2014. Even in 2015, as I grew rounder each week, I also grew more comfortable with the trails. Hiking while pregnant became easier over the season, although I’m happy it ended when it did, because that trend was not sustainable into the third trimester. 

I think about Reviewer #2 and I want to ask: do you mean the person hours per transect in April? Or at the end of June? What kind of mileage were you averaging before the start of the field season? Do you have any old hamstring injuries? Tell me about your field assistants. Do you like to stop for lunch at the summit or are you an on-the-go-snacker? Did you pack a couple bucks to buy a Harbor Bar at the Cadillac souvenir shop? Are you saving your energy for the 10k run at the end of the transect? Is the National Park Service well-funded in this year’s federal budget? How do you feel about stopping for a swim in Sargent Mountain Pond?

I love these questions because each one pulls on a thread winding through my Acadia memories. I hiked upwards of 125 transects between 2013 and 2016, and now that the paper is done, I’m a little sad to be shelving the fieldnotes for good. The trail runners that I wore are long gone, my field hat fell apart, most of my baggy race tshirts carried me through my second pregnancy and suffered for it.

In the end, the idiosyncrasies of the hikes were smoothed and flattened into the sentence, “Each transect could be completed in under 6 person-hours.” This is both true and wildly circumscribed. Not unlike a well done chapter of a PhD dissertation.

*Acadia National Park actually closed the lot by the Pemetic North Ridge trailhead in 2017 and it’s now exclusively a bus stop for the island explorer, the free bus that begins running right as my season wraps up at the end of June.

**This doesn’t include hikes before I had figured out the fulcrum platform. There was "no" data on those hikes (nothing was leafing or blooming, no signs of budburst) and they only exist in my field note books.

***I hired three field assistants for this project and, concurrently, a common garden experiment. In 2014, Paul was my garden guy, but we also hiked two transects together and he hiked two solo. In 2015, Ella, Natasha, and I split the transect and garden work. Ella came back for most of the 2016 season and then I finished the two projects solo in June 2016.

Early Career Researchers Talk #365papers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow Chelsea on twitter: @ChelskiLittle 

Family and the Field

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

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

Her: Just do it in the morning.

Me: I can’t, it’s due at midnight.

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

I bet she gets funded over me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Step One: Paid parental leave for everyone.

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

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

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

Summer Reading (Part 2)

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

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

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

Plant Mysteries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Practices

Do this…

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

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

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

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

Happy Fall Reading! 

Pikas Meet Cute: Two Subspecies, One National Park

The National Park Service is wrapping up celebrations on its 102nd anniversary this August. I’m unabashedly biased towards park science: my dissertation and my postdoc research are both Acadia-based, while cleaning out old papers last week I actually paused for a moment before recycling a torn up, coffee-stained copy of a National Park research permit from 2013. (Don't worry, the original pdf is safely stored on an external hard drive.)

I’d report on the hybridization of pikas in Rocky Mountain National Park even without the excuse of a belated happy birthday to the National Park Service, but clearly covering research on pikas and #poopscience is the perfect way to honor the stewards of our public lands. There are charismatic megafauna (mini-fauna?) and there are charismatic landscapes, and the scientists who study pikas in the western National Parks enviably have cornered the market on both. Dr. Jessica Castillo Vardaro just published new research on the population genetics of American pikas in PLoS ONE last month. In “Identification of a contact zone and hybridization for two subspecies of the American pika (Ochotona princeps) within a single protected area” Castillo Vardaro and coauthors analyze the DNA in pika poop to pinpoint where the northern and southern Rocky Mountain lineages of these rabbit relatives meet. Their pika #poopscience spanned samples from Grand Teton National Park, Great Sand Dunes National Park, and Rocky Mountain National Park.

Before Castillo Vardaro’s work, there was some evidence that the northern and southern Rocky Mountain pika subspecies had a historic contact zone somewhere near-ish Rocky Mountain National Park. However, Castillo Vardaro wasn’t looking for a contact zone or hybrid pikas when she began working on the Pikas in Peril (PIP) project — a team of National Park Service staff and academic researchers. Pikas are a bit of poster child for climate change vulnerability — “a climate indicator species” — because they cannot tolerate prolonged exposure to high temperatures. Castillo Vardaro’s initial genetic analyses of pika populations in western National Parks focused on signals of isolation by distance (IBD). She explains, “the further individuals are apart geographically, the less related they are genetically. Since pikas typically establish territories close to where they were born and mate with their neighbors, I expected to see strong signals of IBD. I did in all of my study sites except Rocky Mountain National Park (ROMO).” Comparisons of the pika samples and their sequences to Genbank showed that there were two genetic lineages represented in ROMO — Northern and Southern. Then, at a pika meeting (could there be a cuter meeting?) Castillo Vardaro met Preston Somers, a researcher who studied pika dialect in the Rockies in the 1970's. She notes, “His work suggested there might be a contact zone, but we were the first to actually show it and evidence of contemporary gene flow. So, we weren't initially interested in studying ROMO as a potential contact zone, but we are now.” The analyses in this research are steeped in #poopscience, or what the paper refers to as “fecal samples…through a combination of random, targeted, and opportunistic sampling.” I asked Castillo Vardaro about the trade offs of #poopscience versus tissue samples. As a plant ecologist, my Methods have never included gems like, “We avoided collecting old fecal pellets by preferentially collecting pellets with green plant material inside to avoid degraded DNA” — but I was curious to hear more. Castillo Vardaro expounded,

Fecal DNA is essentially the mucus and cells lining the digestive tract that then coat the fecal pellet as it passes through. There are very few cells compared to tissue (organ tissue or ear clips), there are other things present that can inhibit the PCR process like plant secondary compounds, and the feces has been sitting around outside for an unknown amount of time so the DNA can degrade. Each sample has to be genotyped multiple times to overcome the errors resulting from low quality/quantity DNA. My genotyping success rate was 50% - 75%, after removing samples that failed, contaminated samples, and multiple samples collected from the same individual unknowingly. That's a lot of work in the lab.

But, the #poopscience lab work pays off if you need lots of samples across a broad geographic area:

In contrast, I just got back from a week in Montana where I was helping my coauthor Chris Ray trap pikas at a site she has been monitoring for 30 years. In four days of effort (two trap days, but it takes a day to set up traps and a day to check traps/process pikas) we trapped 5 pikas. One person can collect 10-25 quality fecal samples in a day, plus anyone can collect fecal samples for genetic analyses after about 10 minutes of training. So while I would have preferred to have worked with tissue, there is no way to sample the number of individual pikas necessary for 10 high resolution genetic analyses if you had to trap every animal.

The collaborative nature of Castillo Vardaro’s research and the Pikas in Peril reminded me of an earlier blog post I wrote about the Biological Conservation paper “The importance of non-academic coauthors in bridging the conservation genetics gap.”  I noticed that Castillo Vardaro’s PLoS coauthors were all academics, but she pointed out that her coauthor and grad mentor, Clint Epps, designed the PIP project alongside National Park Service personnel and other academic researchers. “The questions, goals, and desired products were explicit from the beginning. These included National Park Service reports, summaries, briefs (publications on the web and available at the parks themselves), spatial data, and research that could be utilized in each of the parks.”

While Castillo Vardaro was doing field work, she worked with National Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service biologists, interns, and volunteers. She noted, “we worked with interpretive staff to prepare the park specific resource briefs. We (myself, Clint Epps, and Doni Schwalm) also wrote a note on the potential effects of a proposed quarry site in Grand Teton National Park on the pika populations there, which was provided to resource managers there.” Basically, this work (one of Castillo Vardaro’s dissertation chapters) is the exception that proves the rule to the non-academic coauthors paper: here, the coauthor list belies the strong partnerships with non-academic scientists and managers, and if you didn’t know about Pikas in Peril, you might think wow, these academics really know how to put together explicit management implications single-handedly! 

Finally, in Castillo Vardaro’s research I saw a mirror of my own dissertation work. I had no pikas or fecal DNA, but we both finished our dissertation field work in National Parks before the 2016 election. Her work could inform whether pikas are listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act; my research supported a climate change vulnerability assessment; and after our halcyon days as PhD students under the Obama administration, we are now watching an administration and Secretary of the Interior generally disregard the National Park Service expertise on these issues.

I told Castillo Vardaro that I feel an extra sense of urgency in publishing my Acadia papers now — especially in open access venues. I wondered if this was a personal quirk or if she felt a similar sense of responsibility for her field sites and study species. She agreed that highlighting the work that we are doing on public and federally managed lands is even more important in the current political climate. “One of the main reasons I chose to publish in PLOS ONE was because I wanted the manuscript to be accessible (open access).” She also noted that, “the PIP project was funded as part of the NPS Climate Change Response Program. I do worry about continued funding for similar projects and initiatives under Zinke and the Trump administration. Pikas tend to live in places that aren't as directly impacted by development as other ecosystems (it would be difficult to put a subdivision on the steep, rocky, side of a mountain), but the policies and proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act under the current administration to make it easier for development and resource extraction on public lands could definitely impact pikas.” 

The flipside of non-academic coauthors bridging a conservation gap is this: when the federal government is hostile towards non-extractive natural resource management, the academic coauthors in these partnerships will continue to publish our findings, piling up the evidence to support our field sites and our study species. For those of us in academia who completed National Park fieldwork in what seems like another era, getting the writing done can seem both daunting and futile. It's not. Traditionally, the first wedding anniversary is the “paper” anniversary, but for the National Park Service’s 102nd I think papers are still an appropriate — and important — gift. 

References:

Castillo Vardaro JA, Epps CW, Frable BW, Ray C (2018) Identification of a contact zone and hybridization for two subspecies of the American pika (Ochotona princeps) within a single protected area. PLoS ONE 13(7): e0199032.

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! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)