Reading & Listening to Cape Cod

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking for Human-Nature Connections in Seasonal Wikipedia Searches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reference:

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

On Story Telling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

Graphic Novels & Socio-Ecological Systems

Let’s say you’ve just pulled off an innovative, interdisciplinary symposia bringing together stakeholders across socio-ecological systems in the world’s oceans. You spent a week in France with 230 ecologists, social scientists, economists, modellers, and lawyers collaborating on solutions for managing and protecting marine ecosystems. Now, how do you get the broader scientific community to read your symposium report? 

If you were clever enough to invite a professional cartoonist to the symposia, you pull together pages of fun, dynamic sketches and publish a graphic novel in the ICES Journal of Marine Science.

This is the amazing — and fun! — trick that Dr. Olivier Thébaud and Dr. Jason Link accomplished after MSEAS 2016. ‘Managing marine socio-ecological systems: picturing the future’ is a graphic novel illustrated by Bas Kohler that was published alongside Dr. Link’s traditional overview of the MSEAS 2016 Symposium. The illustrations are amazing — they pack in energy and dialogue with playful humor across an incredible range of serious, challenging subjects.

The backstory of this graphic novel contains a lesson in interdisciplinary communication. The science steering committee for MSEAS 2016 invested serious planning time into the social side of their symposium. Dr. Thébaud writes:

The idea of inviting Bas Kohler at MSEAS was initially aimed at increasing interaction between participants during the meeting, as we were bringing together folks from different disciplinary networks which do not usually meet.

Dr. Link and other steering committee members were skeptical, but MSEAS brought in cartoonist Bas Kohler through funding dedicated to the social and cultural side of the event. After Day 1, everyone at MSEAS was hooked. As Dr. Link remembers, “Kohler’s beautiful illustrations just got to the core of your talk. In fact, there was a lot of negative feedback from the day without Bas. He was wanted at every session!” After MSEAS 2016 Dr. Link says he “drew the short straw” to write the normal, boring report. But, “no one reads the boring report. We wanted to do something unique. This was a conference about social and human systems and we wanted to capture that in a different medium.” So, Dr. Link brainstormed an outline for a cartoon report. He wanted to tell a story about the state of the discipline, the meeting itself, and future directions for scientists and stakeholders. The MSEAS team looked through Kohler’s illustrations from the symposium to create the graphic novel around this outline. Dr. Link did write a straightforward report — it's published in the same issue of ICES Journal of Marine Science — but he also pitched the graphic novel to an editor at the journal. This was not a terribly risky pitch since Link was friends with the editor, but as far as he knows it is the first graphic novel published in a peer reviewed journal.

We talked a little bit about the intersection of art and science. There are many artists engaged in science communication, through most of their work is facing out towards the general public. In this case with a graphic novel in a journal*, MSEAS has Bas Kohler’s work facing inward, toward the scientific community. Link is hopeful that this “paper” will inspire other conference organizers to consider bringing artists to their symposia. He encourages others to carve out a small fraction of the conference budget, explore local artists, and ask how do we want to capture our story? “Just have it on the list,” he says. He’s following his own advice, currently working on another symposia steering committee and exploring this option again. “A lot of us have been in this game for awhile — we need to mix it up and keep it fresh.” Happy reading!

Reference:

Thébaud, Olivier, Jason S. Link, Bas Kohler, Marloes Kraan, Romain López, Jan Jaap Poos, Jörn O. Schmidt, David C. Smith, and Handling editor: Howard Browman. "Managing marine socio-ecological systems: picturing the future." ICES Journal of Marine Science 74, no. 7 (2017): 1965-1980.  

*The graphic novel & MSEAS report are open access and thus available to the general public, but still, deciding to publish in a journal is by definition looking for niche audience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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