Wrapped and Read: A Reading Advent Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She's Making a List...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 *Hi Max!

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

Drawn to Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reference:

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

Early Career Researchers Talk #365papers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow Chelsea on twitter: @ChelskiLittle 

Summer Reading (Part 1)

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

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

On Mountains

Think globally & way into the past…

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

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

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

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

On Phenology 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus “Reads”

Recent podcast episodes tangentially related to recent blogging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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