The Effective Scientist

22 03 2018

final coverWhat is an effective scientist?

The more I have tried to answer this question, the more it has eluded me. Before I even venture an attempt, it is necessary to distinguish the more esoteric term ‘effective’ from the more pedestrian term ‘success’. Even ‘success’ can be defined and quantified in many different ways. Is the most successful scientist the one who publishes the most papers, gains the most citations, earns the most grant money, gives the most keynote addresses, lectures the most undergraduate students, supervises the most PhD students, appears on the most television shows, or the one whose results improves the most lives? The unfortunate and wholly unsatisfying answer to each of those components is ‘yes’, but neither is the answer restricted to the superlative of any one of those. What I mean here is that you need to do reasonably well (i.e., relative to your peers, at any rate) in most of these things if you want to be considered ‘successful’. The relative contribution of your performance in these components will vary from person to person, and from discipline to discipline, but most undeniably ‘successful’ scientists do well in many or most of these areas.

That’s the opening paragraph for my new book that has finally been release for sale today in the United Kingdom and Europe (the Australasian release is scheduled for 7 April, and 30 April for North America). Published by Cambridge University Press, The Effective Scientist. A Handy Guide to a Successful Academic Career is the culmination of many years of work on all the things an academic scientist today needs to know, but was never taught formally.

Several people have asked me why I decided to write this book, so a little history of its genesis is in order. I suppose my over-arching drive was to create something that I sincerely wish had existed when I was a young scientist just starting out on the academic career path. I was focussed on learning my science, and didn’t necessarily have any formal instruction in all the other varied duties I’d eventually be expected to do well, from how to write papers efficiently, to how to review properly, how to manage my grant money, how to organise and store my data, how to run a lab smoothly, how to get the most out of a conference, how to deal with the media, to how to engage in social media effectively (even though the latter didn’t really exist yet at the time) — all of these so-called ‘extra-curricular’ activities associated with an academic career were things I would eventually just have to learn as I went along. I’m sure you’ll agree, there has to be a better way than just muddling through one’s career picking up haphazard experience. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : author order, authorship, bad grammar, blog, book, co-author, conference, education, Endarkenment, ethics, Flinders University, gender, jobs, journalism, mathematics, media, modelling, research, science, science communication, science writing, scientific publishing, scientific writing, statistics, writing tips

Fancy a job in biosecurity controlling pest species?

13 12 2018

Rabbits-Western-NSW

My mate Dr Brad Page — Principal Biosecurity Officer (Pest Animals) at Biosecurity SA — asked me to post the following jobs he’s advertising for pest-animal control. Now, I’m near-completely opposed to ‘wild dog’ (i.e., dingo) control in Australia, but I’ve agreed to post the third position as well, despite my ecological misgivings. Brad has a different perspective.

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We have exciting opportunities for three new pest animal control coordinators, who will be working to support and reinvigorate control of deer, rabbits, and ‘wild dogs’.

All three coordinators will be part of our Biosecurity SA Division within PIRSA. These new positions will report to our Principal Biosecurity Officer, Pest Animals.

cnt-deer

Deer and Rabbit Control Coordinators (two positions)

The Deer Control Coordinator and the Rabbit Control Coordinator will provide tailored professional support to natural resource management (NRM) staff and community groups doing control programs. These coordinators will aim to increase the impact of deer and rabbit control programs to support primary producers and biodiversity managers. The position will connect and empower existing community and industry groups, maximising impacts of their efforts to control feral deer and rabbits in agricultural landscapes. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : agriculture, alien species, animal welfare, Australia, environmental policy, governance, human-wildlife conflict, invasive species, jobs, mammal, management, meso-predator release, restoration, South Australia, southern Australia, top-down ecology

Perseverance eventually gets the policy makers’ attention

10 12 2018
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My entry badge today to the South Australian Parliament (sorry for the shitty reproduction, but it’s a shitty photo of a shitty photo)

I’ve often commented on it over the years, as well as written about it both in my latest book, as well as featured it here on CB.com, that little of the conservation science we do appears to reach the people making all the decisions. This is, of course, a massive problem because so much policy that affects biodiversity is not evidence-based, nor do we seem to be getting any better at telling them how buggered our natural world is.

Even the Extinction Rebellion, or school kids screaming in the streets about lack of climate-change policies appears unable to budge the entrenched, so what hope do we lonely little scientists have of getting in a Minister’s ear? It’s enough to make one depressed.

look-at-me-girlSo, we go through the motions; we design ideal reserves with the aid of our computers, we tell people how much to fish, we tell them why feral species are bad, etc., etc., and then we publish our findings and walk away. We might do a little more and shout our messages loudly from the media rooftops, or submit comments to proposed policies, or even draft open letters or petitions. Yet no matter how hard we seem to try, our messages of urgency and despair largely fall on deaf ears.

It’s enough to make you reconsider and not bothering at all.

But! Despite my obviously jaded perspective, two things have happened to me recently that attest to how a little perseverance, sticking to your guns, and staying on message can reach the ears of the powerful. My examples are minuscule in the grand scheme of things, nor will they necessarily translate into anything really positive on the ground; yet, they give me a modicum of hope that we can make a positive difference.

The first event happened a few weeks ago after we did a press release about our paper on co-extinction cascades published in Scientific Reports. Yes, it got into a few big newspapers and radio, but I thought it wouldn’t do much more than peak the punters’ interest for the typical 24-hour news cycle. However, after the initial media interest died down, I received an e-mail from one of my university’s media officers saying that the we had been cited in The Senate (one of the two houses in the Australian Parliament)! An excerpt of the transcript is shown below (you can read the whole thing — if you could be bothered — here): Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, biodiversity, carbon, climate change, conservation, ecology, economics, ecosystem services, environmental policy, extinction, governance, invasive species, management, monitoring, science, science communication, South Australia

With a Rebel Yell, Scientists Cry ‘No, no, more!’

29 11 2018

Adrenaline makes experiences hyper-real. Everything seems to move in slow motion, apart from my heart, which is so loud that I am sure people can hear it even over the traffic.

It’s 11:03 on a sunny November morning in central London. As the green man starts to shine, I walk into the middle of the road and sit down. On either side of me, people do the same. There can only be about 50 of us sitting on this pedestrian crossing, and I murmur ‘are we enough?’

‘Look behind you,’ says a new friend.

I turn. Blackfriar’s Bridge, usually covered in cars and buses, is filling with people. Citizens walking into the road and staying there, unfurling colourful flags with hourglass symbols on them. The police film us, standing close, but make no move to arrest anyone. Later, we discover that at least some of them encourage our disobedience.

Messages start coming in — 6,000 people are here, and we’ve blocked five bridges in central London with Extinction Rebellion, protesting for action to stop climate change and species extinctions. I’m a scientist participating in my first ever civil disobedience, and for me, this changes everything.

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Left to right: protestors include kids, company directors, and extinct species.

What makes a Cambridge academic — and thousands of other people — decide that sitting in a road is their best chance of being heard? In short, nothing else has got us the emissions cuts we need. The declaration that global warming is real and that greenhouse-gas emissions need to be cut came in 1988, when I was a year old. Since then, scientists have continued to be honest brokers, monitoring greenhouse gases, running models, presenting the facts to governments and to the people. And emissions have continued to climb. The 2018 IPCC report that shocked many of us into action told us we have 12 years to almost halve emissions, or face conditions incompatible with civilisation. How did we end up here? Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : climate change, climate shift, conservation, extinction, propaganda

Global warming causes the worst kind of extinction domino effect

25 11 2018

Dominos_Rough1-500x303Just under two weeks ago, Giovanni Strona and I published a paper in Scientific Reports on measuring the co-extinction effect from climate change. What we found even made me — an acknowledged pessimist — stumble in shock and incredulity.

But a bit of back story is necessary before I launch into describing what we discovered.

Last year, some Oxbridge astrophysicists (David Sloan and colleagues) published a rather sensational paper in Scientific Reports claiming that life on Earth would likely survive in the face of cataclysmic astrophysical events, such as asteroid impacts, supernovae, or gamma-ray bursts. This rather extraordinary conclusion was based primarily on the remarkable physiological adaptations and tolerances to extreme conditions displayed by tardigrades1 — those gloriously cute, but tiny (most are around 0.5 mm long as adults) ‘water bears’ or ‘moss piglets’ — could you get any cuter names?

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Found almost everywhere and always (the first fossils of them date back to the early Cambrian over half a billion years ago), these wonderful little creatures are some of the toughest metazoans (multicellular animals) on the planet. Only a few types of extremophile bacteria are tougher.

So, boil, fry or freeze the Earth, and you’ll still have tardigrades around, concluded Sloan and colleagues.

When Giovanni first read this, and then passed the paper along to me for comment, our knee-jerk reaction as ecologists was a resounding ‘bullshit!’. Even neophyte ecologists know intuitively that because species are all interconnected in vast networks linked by trophic (who eats whom), competitive, and other ecological functions (known collectively as ‘multiplex networks’), they cannot be singled out using mere thermal tolerances to predict the probability of annihilation. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : bottom-up ecology, climate change, climate shift, community ecology, conservation, conservation ecology, ecology, extinction, extinction debt, extinction vortex, modelling, top-down ecology

Better Prospects for the Future of South Australia’s Biodiversity

21 11 2018

eucalypt

A major environmental event quietly slipped through the major news outlets in South Australia this week without much of a mention at all. Yet, I argue it’s one of the most important collective assessments of the state of South Australia’s environment to date. 

Yes, it’s been exactly five years since the last State of the Environment Report released by the South Australia Environment Protection Authority (EPA), and on Monday this week they released the 2018 Report. What’s perhaps even sadder than the poor performance of our state’s environmental performance is that it barely got a mention, nor does seem to have been noticed by many South Australians at all. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, when major protests like the UK’s Extinction Rebellion movement hardly got a mention at all last week, it’s no wonder that the release of the Report fails to raise the interest of average citizens in South Australia.

Full disclosure here — I contributed to this year’s State of the Environment Report as one of several independent ‘experts’ commenting on particular aspects of our environment. Yes, this year’s report has made a major leap in this regard by not merely reporting the trends of various indicators (and with rather unconvincing conclusions in many cases because of a lack of monitoring data), but by also including independent overviews of Aquatic Ecosystems, Biodiversity, and Coastal Protection. I was the one asked to write the Biodiversity Issues paper.

While you can download the full report here, I thought it best to summarise the key findings in this blog post (supporting references can be found in the report itself):

Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, biodiversity, conservation, decline, deforestation

Why a (young) scientist should blog

12 11 2018

I started to blog in the middle of my PhD, exactly on 17 February 2011 — as a scientist I remember my first blog like a soccer-loving kid might remember his/her first soccer ball. Postgraduates from ACAD have recently asked me to give a talk about my blogging experience, and I couldn’t resist turning my talk into a blog.

Salvador Herrando-Pérez

 

CB_ScientificBlogging_nov2018

The cover of the February (polar bears) and December (water flea) 2017 issues of the Spanish magazine Quercus featured two of my popular-science articles. Founded in 1981, and with a current print run of some 15,000 copies monthly, Quercus has pioneered the dissemination of ecological and environmental science with a conservation edge in Spain and survived the digitalisation age, which has recently deserved the prestigious 2018 BBVA prize for Biodiversity Conservation. My liaison with the magazine already spans seven years with 49 articles published in three theme series (conservation biology: 2011-2012; animal behaviour: 2013; and climate change: active since January 2017 in collaboration with my colleague David Vieites).

I write in blogs, but I am not a blogger in the sense of owning and managing a blog. More exactly, I write about science using a language that should be understandable by an audience of scientists and, primarily, non-scientists. The best English expression I have found to qualify such activity is ‘popular science’ (I use it interchangeably with ‘blog’ hereafter). And blogs are just one platform (internet) to publish popular science.

In fact, I publish popular science on a regular basis here in ConservationBytes, and in Quercus: a printed Spanish-language magazine about ecology and biodiversity. My articles in those outlets typically synthesise the findings, and expand the background and implications, of high-profile research papers from the primary literature. Sometimes, I also write blogs to maximise the audience of my own publications (e.g., here and here), or to discuss a topic of general interest (e.g., numerical literacy). I have listed all my blogs on ConservationBytes at the end of the text.

Frankly, I had never stopped to think why I started and why I keep writing popular science. So after a bit of brainstorming, I have come up with five personal motivations which will probably resonate with those of other scientists entering the Blogosphere (1) — see here Corey’s take on the virtues of blogging.

Self-promotion

When you are in the early stage of your research career, letting your peers know that you exist is essential, unless one already publishes hot papers that everybody reads and cites, and/or you have already amassed quite a reputation in the scientific community (not my case). Let’s be clear: my blogs are bound to be read by more people than my research papers, because blogs magnify the chances of being detected by search engines (2), and because the size of the scientific community is dwarfed by the size of the internet community. Doubtless, self-promotion drew me into popular science in the first place, when I was just a PhD student — ahead of me lay some five to ten years over which I would have to compete hard for funding and publication space with a respectable crowd of other researchers, let alone to create new partnerships with colleagues in and out of my area of expertise. So, blogging initially meant like saying ‘hey! I am here, I am doing science’.

Funding/Outreach

Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : blog, ecological literacy, ecology, science, science communication, science writing, scientific writing

Biodiversity offsetting is off-putting

5 11 2018

Ancient-woodland-has-movedBiodiversity offsets are becoming more popular in Australia and elsewhere as a means to raise money for conservation and restoration while simultaneously promoting economic development (1). However, there are many perverse consequences for biodiversity if they are not set up carefully (1-3).

Biodiversity ‘offsets’ are intended to work in a similar way to carbon offsets1, in that the destruction of a part of an ecosystem (e.g., a native forest or grassland, or a wetland) can be offset by paying to fund the restoration of another, similar ecosystem elsewhere. As such, approval to clear native vegetation usually comes with financial and other conditions.

But there are several problems with biodiversity offsetting, including the inconvenient fact that creating an equivalent ecosystem somewhere takes substantially longer than it does to destroy one somewhere else (e.g., 4). While carbon emitted in one place is essentially the same as that sequestered elsewhere, a forest can take hundreds of years to develop the same biodiversity values and ecological functions it had prior to destruction. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : biodiversity, biosequestration, conservation, conservation biology, deforestation, ecosystem, environmental economics, environmental policy, environmental science, fragmentation, investment, management, protected area, recovery, restoration

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