Learn Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

Reading, Walking, Wishing

June in New England is a long stretch of long-lit days. When I was a PhD student, my Junes were the peak of my field season and I spent the long days logging miles up and down Cadillac, Sargent, and Pemetic mountains. For four years, my Junes were hiking ridges, recording data, wearing holes in the toes of my trailrunners. Now, I’m revising the papers that were written on the heels of those leg muscles and it’s weird to be indoors in June, sitting at a computer, without the tight hamstrings or blackfly bites.

After a long slog through a cold spring, this June I’ve returned to reading, picking up #365papers again in earnest after slacking off on the literature for a few months. Last week, I read Liam Heneghan’s essay “Have Ecologists Lost Their Senses? Walking and Reflection as Ecological Method” in Trends in Ecology & Evolution. I was indoors, at my desk, with the AC whirring, reading about walking. I felt like a fish out of water, or more aptly a field ecologist out of nature. In the essay, Henegham makes the distinction between ecologists and naturalists, comparing word counts in the anthologies The Essential Naturalist: Timeless Readings in Natural History (2011) and Foundations of Ecology: Classic Papers with Commentaries (2012).

“Although the two disciplines ‘observe’ and ‘see’ things in equal measure, natural historians nonetheless report engaging all of their senses in the pursuit of observations of nature to a greater degree. Natural historians report touching, feeling, hearing, and smelling the things of the world to an extent that scientific ecologists do not. Indeed, ecologists, if this small sample is representative, have abandoned smelling in its entirety. Moreover, natural historians ‘walk’, ‘roam’, ‘climb’, ‘sniff’, and ‘listen’ to a degree their ecological colleagues do not.”

I am a roaming, climbing, sniffing ecologist. But I bristled at the thought that ecologists as a whole should be compelled to walk to prove some kind of connection to the true core of the discipline. Heneghan does not outrightly demand that all ecologists walk, roam, and climb — his main argument seems to be the gentle conjecture “ecologists may have overlooked the fact that scrutinizing nature can benefit from an engagement of all the senses” — but he doesn’t leave much space within the discipline for non-field ecologists.

Perhaps Heneghan’s essay title is misleading and he isn’t worried about all ecologists losing their senses, just the outdoor ones. The field-based, nose-to-the-ground, perambulatory science that Heneghan and I practice is clearly not universal to ecology — and it shouldn’t be! We need modelers and theorists and lab scientists! But I fell for this essay hard. I am the target audience. When I started as a master’s student at the University of Vermont’s Field Naturalist and Ecological Planning program, my Botany 311 class, the Fall Field Practicum series of weekly full-day field trips, listed 7 goals on the syllabus. Goal #7: “Visit bakeries and enjoy spending the day outdoors.” In Heneghan’s analysis of word counts in the Ecology vs. Natural History texts, “Breakfast” receives 0.72 mentions per page in The Essential Naturalist; it does not appear at all in Foundations in Ecology*. Just digging out my Fall Field Practicum syllabus conjured up memories of cider donuts and eskers, travel mugs of maple-syrup-sweetened coffee and ombrotrophic bogs. My UVM experience was steeped in the kind of sensory details that Heneghan would appreciate and savor.

‘Walking and Reflection as Ecological Method’ reminded me of a similar paper I’d read in another (sadly non-bakery-centered) UVM class: Craig Loehle’s 1990 ‘A guide to increased creativity in research — inspiration or perspiration?’ Loehle also identifies the benefits of walking as a part of the scientific process when he encourages students to “get bored” as a work habit. This is recommended alongside running, procrastinating, and surfing — allegories for carving out time to think deeply and engage in non-productive, non-routine activities. These pursuits, Loehle promises, will facilitate creative problem solving. When I went back to re-read Loehle this week, I was surprised to find the advice “Don’t read the literature” under his list of methods for releasing creativity. I am, traditionally, a big fan of reading the literature. I’m a reader: when I was asked to review a Tansley Insight manuscript for The New Phytologist, my first move was to download and read the 2015 editorial “Introducing Tansley Insights – short and timely, focussed reviews within the plant sciences.” I won’t admit how many other Tansley Insights I downloaded after. A lot, okay? Maybe all of them. But Loehle’s “Don’t read the literature” is not a blanket statement; he clarifies that the first step as a scientist begins mulling over a new idea should not be to run to Web of Science (or whatever researchers used to find papers back in the dark ages of 1990), but to work through it a bit on your own.

“[Reading the literature] channels your thoughts too much into well-worn grooves. Second, a germ of an idea can easily seem insignificant in comparison to finished studies. Third, the sheer volume of material to read may intimidate you to abandoning any work in a new area.”

I agree with Loehle on all three points, but I’d add that the habit of reading broadly in the literature — taking recommendations from twitter**, searching outside of the Table of Contents of your subdiscipline’s favorite journal, checking out how your pet methodology is applied in another country or ecosystem, or seeking out papers with your field site as a keyword by researchers who are not in your field — is a kind of antidote to the well-worn grooves.

This month I read papers from Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, Alpine Botany, Bioscience, Conservation Biology, Current Biology, Ecology, Ecosphere, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Integrative and Comparative Biology, Journal of Applied Ecology, Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, Nature Geoscience, New Phytologist, Ocean & Coastal Management, Palynology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Trends in Ecology & Evolution. I am a broadly trained field ecologist — thanks UVM! — but as my career has progressed I’ve naturally found myself engaged in narrower research pursuits, and reading broadly keeps me centered, provides context for the tedium of slicing a 4.09 m core of lake sediment into half centimeter subsamples, and makes my work feel connected to society, policy, and big-picture conservation.

I’ll likely never publish in Ocean & Coastal Management, but reading “‘Back off, man, I’m a scientist!’ When marine conservation science meets policy”*** resonated with my own experiences writing public comments and meeting with congressional staffers. In a way, reading broadly is a kind of indoor-walking for restless ecologists who are prone to wandering.

Loehle and Heneghan’s essays are endlessly quotable for natural history students. But while they strive to expand how scientists engage in the world — Shake off your routine! Get outside! Smell! — they present an ironically narrow picture of role models. The patron saints of creative, roaming researchers, name-checked by both Loehle and Heneghan, are Darwin and MacAthur. I feel very strongly that if your argument around what’s needed in the “culture of ecology” can be reduced to “be more like this white man who had the privilege to travel freely and comfortably in the outdoors” you are fundamentally wrong. In Heneghan’s case, in 2018, there’s no excuse for whitewashing field ecology. Priya Shukla’s amazing piece in Bay Nature Magazine beautifully lays out the importance of representation in contemporary ecology, and the urgent need to uncover and share the ways in which wild landscapes are not empty areas that blankly awaited manifest destiny and reflect only Anglo-European stories. She writes “We need an act of revisionist natural history to color in the environmental and conservation movements. We should remind every hiker, biker, birder, citizen scientist, and field researcher that innumerable diverse people have shaped our natural spaces.” In a series of profiles of diverse voices in outdoor recreation, James Edward Mills writes in Outside, “Organizations like Outdoor Afro, Latino Outdoors, and Out There Adventures have begun stripping away the presumption of a white, male, heterosexual experience. Even more importantly, by unapologetically presenting their unique points of view, they’ve shined a light on a rich heritage of adventure and environmental stewardship that has been there for generations.”

This diversity exists in field ecology and natural history writing too, and it is not hard to find. Sure, Darwin and MacArthur were great at walking and writing about walking with wonderful sensory detail — but have you read J. Drew Lanham’s essay ‘Birding While Black’ or his book The Home Place? Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass? Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood****? Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl —in which the titular "girl" (Jahren) spends long stretches outside of the lab writing lyrically about working in the outdoors?

Heneghan begins his essay in a bog, but his call to arms (hiking boots?) is not simply an #OptOutside manifesto. He follows his walking naturalists — his long list of old white men: Irish botanist Robert Lloyd Praeger, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, Robert McArthur, and E. O. Wilson — indoors to their writing desks. At the end of the piece, Heneghan is in the archives, reading Praeger’s papers and reflecting on his prodigious writing. “A day’s walk can furnish long hours back at the desk.” Heneghan muses, “Thus for every insight into nature, there is a hidden process by which that insight was achieved; every active life contains a hidden core of repose.”

So this is my indoor June, my hidden core of repose. My trailrunners lie neglected, but the writing & reading continues, as I adventure through the memories and field notes and spreadsheets on the heels of the illustrious white men, and the many, many equally bold, sure-footed, and thoughtful unnamed white women and people of color who have trod this path before me.

References:

Heneghan, L., 2018. Have Ecologists Lost Their Senses? Walking and Reflection as Ecological Method. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 1–4. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2018.04.016 

Loehle, Craig. 1990. "A guide to increased creativity in research: inspiration or perspiration?." Bioscience 40.2: 123-129.  

*I have a confession to make here. I read most of Foundations in Ecology while I was a PhD student. I had not even heard of The Essential Naturalist until I read this paper. So maybe I’m not such a great naturalist after all? ...Or maybe I’m an amazing naturalist, always outside tromping around, and I don’t have time to read natural history anthologies because I’m too busy smelling nature?

**I found Heneghan’s essay by way of @ChelskiLittle’s prolific #365papers tweets. Thanks Chelsea!

***I found this paper by way of @Drew_Lab’s #365papers tweets. Thanks Josh!

****I cannot say enough about Milkweed Editions. This independent, nonprofit literary powerhouse in Minneapolis publishes incredible environmental writing. My husband gifted me a Milkweed book subscription years ago and it's my absolute favorite piece of mail every month. Maybe 30% of my love for LacCore & the science they do there is a side effect of the fact that every time I visit LacCore, I get to take a side trip to Milkweed.