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 

Looking for Human-Nature Connections in Seasonal Wikipedia Searches

Recently, I was wrapping up some revisions on a phenology paper and to comply with the journal’s style for taxonomy, I needed to know the authority on a species of white violets that a Maine hunting guide had noted in his diaries in the mid-twentieth century. Obviously, I turned to Wikipedia.

Ecologists who study phenology (or anything!) use Wikipedia all the time, but Dr. John C. Mittermeier and his coauthors take this practice to a whole new level in their paper A season for all things: Phenological imprints in Wikipedia usage and their relevance to conservation. This study, published in PLoS Biology earlier this month, uses Wikipedia page views to trace when humans show seasonal interest in the natural world. For over 30,000 species in 245 languages —which amassed 2.33 billion pageviews between July 2015 and June 2018 — they found some strong seasonal signals linking how and when people interact with plants and animals online.

“The idea for this study happened somewhat by chance to be honest,” Dr. Mittermeier confides. “I was collecting Wikipedia pageview data on different animals as part of another study (hopefully this should be published soon!) and on a whim I decided to plot a time-series of daily views to see what it looked like.” As an ornithologist, he was drawn to migratory bird data and his whimsical time-series plot for migratory bird page views peaked near its ecological migration season. This was the prototype for a figure in the PLoS Biology paper. Mittermeier says, “this [plot] made me curious as what other plants and animals might show seasonality in their views and how widespread these patterns might be in general.”

While searching for migratory birds on Wikipedia seems categorically different from actual birding, Mittermeier and his colleagues found strong correlations between these two activities. They compared trends in Wikipedia page views to eBird records. In this analysis, eBird frequency records are like “outdoor pageviews” of bird species. “It was easy to match the eBird taxonomy to the taxonomy used by Wikipedia,” Mittermeier says, “and the way in which seasonal abundance information was structured in eBird is very accessible.”

Birders, like Wikipedia users, are surprisingly great at generating big data. Just under half of the bird species in the dataset had page view patterns correlated with seasonal eBird records. But, for species that occurred in more than one of the four language/countries (Italy, Germany, Sweden, and the U.S.), just over a third showed a significant positive relationship between eBird frequency and pageviews across multiple languages. All of the countries in this analysis are in the northern hemisphere and experiencing basically the same seasons, so I asked Mittermeier if this result indicated that some birds are more "seasonally famous" in one location? He agreed that “some species do seem to be more “seasonally famous” than others, meaning that certain species may be viewed more as seasonal indicators. This could be a result of the behavior of the species (i.e. something about their seasonality is particularly visible and obvious), some sort of cultural context (maybe the species featured in a well known book or fairy tale and had a seasonal association there, for example), or some sort of combination of both of these. Comparing how seasonal indicator species are similar or different across languages would be a great way to gain insight into what leads to a species acquiring this significance. I think this is a fascinating question and one that would be very interesting to explore further.” 

But, the paper is not limited to birds, and human interest in animal and plant Wikipedia pages is not always aligned with ecological events. Figure 2 shows a spike in shark species page views that aligns with Shark Week. There are cultural drivers to the phenology of when humans search out certain species on Wikipedia. Mittermeier shares that, “The Wild Turkey was actually the first page that I looked at in relation to cultural events. Turkeys have such a powerful association with the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States I was curious as to whether this would impact people’s online searches (it does as we show in the figure!)” When the turkey hunch worked out, Mittermeier started brainstorming other cultural or marketing events associated with plants or animals that could impact online interest. “This was right around the time that Shark Week was going on over the summer and that’s why I decided to check if that had an impact on pageviews for Great Whites.”  

While the eBird community is full of self-proclaimed bird nerds, and eBird datahas been used inpeer-reviewed papers for over a decade, the programming around Shark Week has a decidedly different relationship to science and natural history. Dr. David Shiffman, a Liber Ero Postdoctoral Fellow in Conservation Biology at Simon Fraser University, studying how information related to sharks is spread on the internet, notes, “Shark Week has a well documented problematic relationship with the truth, spreading nonsense to its massive audience that I and other scientists have to spend years correcting.” I asked him what he thought about the Wikipedia-Shark Week connection that Mittermeier and coauthors uncovered. He says, “the temporary spike in public interest in sharks that Shark Week causes is something that the marine biology community takes advantage of to spread actual facts. This paper provides further evidence that scientists wishing to engage in public outreach about their area of expertise need to know their audience, and know that there are times of year when people are more likely to be receptive to learning about that topic!” Indeed, these seasonal patterns in interest — whether for migratory birds, Thanksgiving turkeys, or sharks — can be leveraged by conservation practitioners to affect policy and outreach.

Research into the public attitudes about species, including how they rise and fall seasonally, is important. Mittermeier and his coauthors write: “Seasonal changes in human interest in plants and animals can have an important role in conservation in at least three ways: (a) by identifying species for which phenology forms a component of their “value,” (b) by helping to reveal differences or similarities in how species are valued across cultural groups, and (c) by providing temporal awareness to help maximize the effectiveness of conservation marketing campaigns.” I’ve experienced this myself in a small way: when I publish papers on spring wildflowers in the dead of winter, the press releases don’t get much traction. 

And finally, I had to address the paradox of scholarly work based on Wikipedia. I’ve TA-ed intro Biology labs and scrawled “not peer-reviewed” next to many Wikipedia-base citations in lab reports. Mittermeier laughed with me, “My mother used to teach junior high school and was always telling her students not to cite Wikipedia and now here I am using it as the source for my research.” 

Reference:

Mittermeier JC, Roll U, Matthews TJ, Grenyer R (2019) A season for all things: Phenological imprints in Wikipedia usage and their relevance to conservation. PLoS Biol 17(3): e3000146. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000146 

National Parks are Hot Spots

In this space, I’ve often shared my love for National Park-based research. I count myself among the researchers devoting time and energy to documenting how climate change affects the ecosystems and natural resources in U.S. National Parks; we study everything from pikas to forests, Joshua trees to birds. But, the underlying rate of warming in these National Parks was not on my radar and I had not given much thought to the climate exposure of National Parks versus the rest of the United States. It turns out, the parks are literal hotspots on the landscape.

Last fall, Dr. Patrick Gonzalez and coauthors from the University of Wisconsin published ‘Disproportionate magnitude of climate change in United States national parks’ in Environmental Research Letters. This study looked at historical and projected temperature and precipitation across all 417 U.S. National Parks. Between 1895 and 2010, mean annual temperature of the national park area increased at double the U.S. rate — parks warmed by 1.0°C (±0.2°C) per century, the rest of the U.S. land area by 0.5 °C.Dr. Gonzalez is a forest ecologist and Associate Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the Principal Climate Change Scientist of the U.S. National Park Service, but he answered my questions here under his Berkeley affiliation, not for the Park Service.

I asked why he wanted to study a spatial analysis of historical and projected climate across all 417 US National Parks. What was the motivation for expanding on the earlier work of researchers who presented similar findings for the 289 large parks in the National Park System system?

“Up until our research, the severity of climate change across all the US national parks was unknown.” Gonzalez writes. “The previous work had only looked at subsets of parks. I work at a national level and it is important for me to give national policy-makers scientific information that is robust and comprehensive. The time-consuming parts of the work were the individual analyses by park and the computational tasks of downscaling all available general circulation model output of future climate projections to 800 m spatial resolution, which had not previously been accomplished for the U.S.”

In addition to the climate exposure of National Parks, Gonzalez and his team considered climate velocities. Climate velocity is the speed at which a plant or animal will need to move, migrate, or disperse — usually north or upslope — to “catch up” to their climate as it changes. Gonzalez found an interesting paradox in climate velocities: the park lands have experienced extreme temperature and precipitation shifts, but they also show lower climate velocity than the U.S. as a whole. They point out that this does not mean that plants and animals in National Parks are not in peril: “The lower climate velocities in the national park area are an artifact of that indicator being calculated as horizontal movement of areas of constant climate. Climate velocity can underestimate exposure in mountains.”

The National Parks are more mountainous than the rest of the United States. This is a reflection of our unsystematic history of serendipitous-style protection; we collect the pretty places as national parks, without considering the underlying biophysical diversity, and mountains are very pretty places. So while moving a couple meters upslope might seem easier than moving hundred of meters north to track a suitable climate, this is often an oversimplification. “Despite the computational artifact, our results indicate that projected climate velocities in national parks could exceed maximum natural dispersal capabilities of many trees, small mammals, and herbaceous plants.” Gonzalez elaborates, “Any new protection of natural areas, whether close to or far from national parks, can add to global conservation of ecosystems for biodiversity and human well-being.”

I asked Gonzalez if he had any thoughts on how the research could be interpreted for park visitors. I wanted to know if there is an effort to get this work not just to park managers on the ground, but to interpretive staff as well. “For national park interpreters, I’ve given many presentations directly to staff in individual parks, including interpreters,” he says. “I encourage all U.S. National Park Service staff to speak about the robust science of climate change and its human cause, which points us to solutions to saving America’s most special places.”

Finally, I noticed that both this paper and the earlier National Park System climate exposure study, which covered 289 large parks, were published in open access journals. I asked if this was an intentional pattern and these research teams were hoping to reach managers who may not have access to peer-reviewed journal articles.

Gonzalez confirmed that, “the open access of the journal of course enabled a much larger audience to directly download and read the original work. This greatly benefited national park staff and other natural resource managers, to whom we aimed to provide information useful for conservation under climate change. Intense interest immediately developed – people downloaded the pdf file more than once a minute in the first 24 hours of publication.”

But their outreach was not limited to open access journals. Gonzalez points out, “public media published over 40 individual stories, including in the Washington Post, on page 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle, on public radio stations, and on television." Gonzalez also wrote a concise summary for the website the Conversation. He says that the University of California, Berkeley, has greatly helped in the effort to reach natural resource managers by publicly posting the spatial data, and he directly provided customized analyses and maps for numerous individual national parks.

Finally, Gonzalez writes, "I just presented the results to the U.S. Congress in a hearing where I testified on human-caused climate change in U.S. national parks. The open access of the journal was critical, but we engaged a broader effort to widely communicate the science.”

Thank you to Dr. Gonzalez and his colleagues for providing the climate data that underlies so much ecological research across the National Park System! And thank you for modeling effective outreach and impressive science communication*! 

References:

Gonzalez, P., Wang, F., Notaro, M., Vimont, D. J., & Williams, J. W. (2018). Disproportionate magnitude of climate change in United States national parks. Environmental Research Letters, 13(10), 104001–13. http://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aade09

Monahan WB, Fisichelli NA (2014) Climate Exposure of US National Parks in a New Era of Change. PLoS ONE 9(7): e101302. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0101302 Banner image: photos by Jodi Kurtz, Via Tsuji, and Gabriel Millos, Creative Commons 

*if I ever publish a paper that averages one pdf download every minute, I will throw the biggest party and give everyone temporary tattoos of the figures.

For Love of Ecology

Happy Valentine's Day! A shortlist of loves.

• I loved this episode of Major Revisions podcast— PLoS Ecology Community Editor Jeff Atkins interviews Rob Nowicki. Their conversation covers Nowicki's analysis of keywords in ecology papers over the past three decades which finds that ecologists today are centering management, and thinking about predictions to a greater degree than their 90s predecessors. Jeff & Rob also compare their fears of bears (the marine ecologist's fear) and sharks (the forest ecologist's fear) and talk about the decline of taxonomists and their own personal failings as naturalists in their study systems. (This honesty is so refreshing! I feel like I am a pretty good naturalist in a very narrow study system, and my skills drop off dramatically as I hike away from the alpine zone, or into southern New England.) Great episode of a fun podcast.

• Earlier this month, K. Taylor PhD wrote a wonderful twitter thread highlighting historic black women in STEM from Diann Jordan's Sisters in Science: Conversations with Black Women Scientists on Race, Gender, and Their Passion for Science. Required reading.

• Some adorable ecology Valentines! Plant Love Stories (hot tip: #PlantHeartArt artist Rosemary Mosco has some additional romanticc omics on her website birdandmoon.com), Maine Audubon & McHenry County Conservation District

• And #ValentineASpecies has been a super fun twitter hashtag.

On Story Telling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

Science Twitter and the Secretly Super-rare Saxifragaceae

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*I do love rock-climbing botanists!

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

Book Review: The Feather Thief

I’ve got my conference roadtrip routine dialed in. This spring I drove to the Northeast Natural History Conference (215 miles each way), the Northeast Alpine Stewardship Gathering (150 miles), the University of Maine Climate Change Institute’s Borns Symposium (250 miles), and (as a fan, not an ecologist) the New England Division 1 College Men’s Ultimate Frisbee Regional Tournament (100 miles). I packed insulated mugs for both hot and iced coffee, a trusty ice scraper for the always-lovely April ice storm in northern Vermont, a light-weight wrap to chase the air conditioning chill on my bare arms after ducking inside on the actually-lovely first 70° days of spring in Maine, and a garment bag of professional clothes to replace my ripped maternity jeans/driving uniform upon rolling into the conference center. I hit the best bakeries (King Arthur’s, Beach Pea, Florence Pie Bar). And on the last few legs, I listened to an amazing, engrossing audiobook: Kirk Wallace Johnson’s The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century. 

My favorite moment in The Feather Thief is not the poignant description of Alfred Russel Wallace watching four years worth of his South American collections burn at sea from the lifeboat of the Helen, or the almost heroic depiction of the generations of curators of natural history collections shepherding scientific information through the ages. It is the suitcase scene. Author Kirk Wallace Johnson and his wife are packing a suitcase: a laundry-laden re-enactment of Edwin Rist’s 2009 theft of hundreds of bird skins from England’s Natural History Museum at Tring: 

“Do you think two hundred ninety-nine birds would’ve fit in just one?”…Seeing where her questions led—that multiple suitcases would suggest multiple people—I got out a medium-size suitcase. Having seen the window at the Tring, I knew he couldn't have fit one much larger through it. Working together, we spent the next hour building a pile of fake birds. A rolled-up pair of dress socks formed a Blue Chatter. She folded several dozen T-shirts and dish towels in the approximate size of an Indian Crow, and used her leggings to fashion Respendent Quetzal tails.We started packing. Marie-Josée, consulting the Tring’s spreadsheet, counted off each species. When the suitcase was halfway full, we were already at eighty birds. Of course, our experiment was hardly scientific—my washcloth Flame Bowerbirds might have been a bit large—but it seemed as though it would’ve been difficult to fit all of them in a single suitcase.

 By this point in the book, the reader (in my case, the listener) has followed rapt while Johnson evolved from a memoirist trying to escape writer’s block through fly-fishing to an amateur detective with an accordion file of notes on the history of biogeography and conservation biology. In the prologue, when he first hears of Edwin Rist’s theft, Johnson is running a foundation committed to helping Iraqi refugees who have worked for U.S.-affiliated organizations to obtain visas to the U.S. (This American Life listeners may remember Johnson’s story from Nancy Updike’s interview in episode 607). He knows almost nothing about fly-tying, museum bird collections, Alfred Russel Wallace, or how these topics could possible overlap. The Feather Thief weaves these niche interests and the unbelievable robbery of 299 bird skins from the Tring into a compelling, larger-than-life narrative that traces Wallace’s birds of paradise from Southeast Asia to Victorian trends in hat fashion to the International Fly Tying Symposium in Somerset, New Jersey. 

When Johnson begins packing his suitcase with laundry-birds, we are deep into the story — the thief has been caught, the case is closed, the Tring curators are sifting through the remains of bird skins separated from their tags, including Ziploc bags of feathers plucked for individual sale and returned to the museum by a paltry few of the fly-tiers who discovered their eBay purchases were stolen goods. In the suitcase scene are the echoes of all the travels of both the bird and human characters of the book — Wallace’s voyages, the ships laden with feathers for fancy hats, the bird skins and other natural history collections spirited to the English countryside and away from bombed out London during World War II, the American flautist studying at the Royal Academy of Music, the stolen bird skins mailed to eBay customers across the globe, Johnson’s own travels from Iraq to New Mexico’s Red River, to New Jersey, South Africa, Germany, and Norway tracking down fly-tiers associated with Rist. 

Many of the legs of Johnson’s trip will be familiar to ecologists. As a community, we know the namesake of the Wallace Line, we’re familiar with the story of how Wallace’s correspondence coerced the plodding Darwin to finally, publicly share his theory of natural selection, we know that some of the earliest major conservation policy was driven by women who were appalled by the hidden cost of other women's decorative hat choices, and we can expound on the value of natural history collections. Though, The Feather Thief might make us think twice before again exclaiming broadly, “Given [natural history collections] breadth of importance and relevance, it would be difficult to imagine anyone dismissing the value of natural history collections to society relative to the research, education, and training of next generation scientists” (Bradley et al 2014).

Throughout the book, the value of natural history collections to society is routinely dismissed — the tags associated with Wallace’s bird skins are tossed aside and the record-keeping at the Tring is questioned by fly-tiers who suggest the museum should sell their extra skins to fly-tiers instead of keeping them in musty drawers. Reflecting on the scientific loss related to his crime, Rist cavalierly (and wrongly) says, “after a certain period of time—I think about a hundred years—technically speaking, all of the scientific data that can be extracted from them has been extracted from them. You can no longer use DNA, because what you would want to do it for is to prolong and help living birds, which hasn’t really worked anyway, because they’re still going extinct, or will go extinct depending on what happens with the rainforests.” This scene reminded me of another science-heist book, Sex on the Moon, in which a NASA intern steals a lab safe full of moon rocks for kicks. The scientist whose samples were taken tells the FBI that the safe also contained his notebooks documenting thirty years of research. The thief “didn’t remember seeing any green notebooks in the safe. As far as he knew, they hadn’t thrown any thing out, other than the safe itself, so if there were notebooks, they’d still be either in Sandra’s storage shed or in the suitcase that had been with them in the Sheraton. But [the thief] didn’t really want to talk about some phantom notebooks.” In both cases, the scientific value of the stolen goods barely registers with the young, white males who believe they are entitled to these rare items.

In The Feather Thief this tension between the curators who mourn the loss of the skins and tags, and the general public’s perception of the heist — a hilarious tale of an American kid robbing a British museum for feathers so he can tie flys that no one will ever actually fish with! — reflects our biases; we, as scientists, do not clearly understand the difference between how we value natural history collections within our community and how these same collections are valued by those outside of science. 

Finally, I want to note one failing in the book. As a former natural history museum intern (shout out to Worcester’s EcoTarium) and herbarium researcher, I bumped on the clumsy way that Johnson described the record keeping associated with museum specimens. He never explained the accessioning process — how museums enter items, like skins or specimens, into their collections. I think that this oversight diminishes Johnson’s eureka moment when he, late in the book, receives the Tring’s spreadsheet of stolen birds: “it meticulously noted the exact number of skins gathered from Edwin’s apartment the morning of the arrest (174), the number of those with tags (102) and without (72), and the number of skins subsequently returned by mail (19).” Later, this same spreadsheet returns but when Johnson reads the column headings aloud, the first one is “Number of Specimens Missing in July 2009.” This column sounds like it was sourced from a museum database, while the first description reflects numbers collected by the police from a crime scene. Johnson documents the fly-tying community’s dismissal of the Tring’s records — "'Ask Tring the last time they counted all their birds!'"— but drops the ball on presenting clear, compelling evidence to support the museum's count of 299 lost skins. It’s never explicitly explained how the 299 tally is calculated, which is a shame because I imagine that opening the empty drawers in the Tring, matching the tags of the left-behind birds — juvenile males and females without the prized technicolor feathers — to the accession numbers and digital photographs of museum records, creating a Missing List for each species and drawer, all of this would be high drama while also offering a window into the work of natural history collections. What specific research had these skins, the missing and the left-behind, contributed to in the past? Which birds had donated DNA or geographic information to scientists before the heist? I imagined these notes, papers, and reports exist but Johnson doesn’t cover them, except to offer general examples of the kinds of research that rely on collections. And here’s the thing: The List Project literally started as a spreadsheet. Johnson knows spreadsheets. Why is this one, which figures so prominently in Johnson’s moment as a main character, which drives his detective work as he dives deeper into the case, so poorly-described? Just another unsolved mystery of The Feather Thief… 

References:

Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century. Viking, 2018.

Robert D. Bradley, Lisa C. Bradley, Heath J. Garner, Robert J. Baker; Assessing the Value of Natural History Collections and Addressing Issues Regarding Long-Term Growth and Care, BioScience, Volume 64, Issue 12, 1 December 2014, Pages 1150–1158, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biu166

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)