Skydive your PhD

23 04 2019

Originally published on the Global Ecology Blog.


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Many students start a PhD by just continuing in the same subject and same institution from their Masters or Honours project. But this is not necessarily the best way to do things. In fact, switching fields and countries for your PhD could end up giving you a decide boost to your career.

Sure, continuing a project with the same supervisors has a lot of advantages for both the student and supervisor. As students, we are familiar with the environment, the research topic, and the specific, technological know-how of our current field. We also know that we have no more than 3 to 4 years to complete a PhD thesis. This period is short, and so avoiding the time to adapt to a new setting and topic is a distinct advantage. From the perspective of the supervisor, this time-saving can also increase the likelihood that the student will finish in time

Given these reasons, it’s difficult to argue why someone should contemplate doing things differently. This was exactly my point of view a few years ago, but I am now convinced that I was wrong.

I decided to do a PhD when I was 16 after an interview I did with a professor as part of a high school project. His eyes were bright, and his obvious passion for the subject fascinated me. A few years later, my first internship in a research lab was so captivating that I subsequently chose my courses and internships accordingly. I had decided to do a PhD in that field, and to become an ‘expert’. In so doing, I thought that I would be more likely to get one of the local PhD scholarships that were on offer. But at the end of my Masters degree, I missed out on being selected. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, science, science writing

A call to wings

19 03 2019

This week sees the launch of an updated bat synopsis from Conservation Evidence, adding new studies that have come out since the first synopsis was published in 2013.

The synopsis collects and summarises studies that test conservation actions such as ‘provide bat boxes for roosting bats’, and organises the studies by the action that they test. This focus on solutions makes it a handy point of reference for conservationists wishing to see what might work — and what is unlikely to work — to conserve bats.

Bechstein’s bat – photo credit Claire Wordley

Bechstein’s bat (Myotis bechsteinii) — photo credit Claire Wordley

 

Free to read or download from Conservation Evidence, the update represents a major addition to the original, containing 173 studies to the original 101. Studies are included if they tested an action that could be put in place for conservation, and measured an outcome for bats. As well as adding studies published from 2013 on, the update adds studies originally published in Spanish or Portuguese, and it is hoped that more languages will be added in future editions. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : agriculture, biodiversity, conservation, development, environmental policy, environmental science, habitat loss, human-wildlife conflict, mammal, management, monitoring, science, South America, tropical

Good English and the scientific career: hurdles for non-native English speakers

13 02 2019

New post from Frédérik Saltré originally presented on the GE.blog.

It’s no secret that to be successful in academia, it’s not enough just to be a good scientist — being able to formulate and test hypotheses. You also need to be able to communicate that science effectively.

This implies a good command of the English language for anyone who wants a career in science. Mastering English (or not) will directly affect your work opportunities such as publishing, establishing networks at conferences, taking leadership of working groups, contributing to lab meetings (there is nothing worse than feeling left out of a conversation because of language limitations), and so forth.

But when it comes to language skills, not everyone is created equal because those skills mostly depend on a person’s background (e.g., learning English as a child or later in life), cultural reluctance, fear of making mistakes, lack of confidence, or simply brain design — this last component might offend some, but it appears that some people just happen to have the specific neuronal pathways to learn languages better than others. Whatever the reason, the process of becoming a good scientist is made more difficult if you happen not to have that specific set of neuronal pathways, even though not being a native English speaker does not prevent from being academically successful.

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Categories : science, science communication, science writing, scientific publishing, scientific writing, words, writing tips

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

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

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

Ecophysiological feedbacks under climate change

29 10 2018

Variability in heat tolerance among populations modifies the climate-driven periods of diurnal activity expected for ectotherm species. We illustrate this phenomenon for Iberian lizards in a paper we have just published in the Journal of Animal Ecology (blog post reproduced with permission by the Journal; see related blog).

Common wall lizard (Podarcis muralis, male) and three localities where the species is abundant in Spain, left to right including Valdesquí/Madrid (Central System), Peñagolosa/Castellón (Iberian System) and El Portalet/Huesca (The Pyrenees).

Iberia is a wonderful natural laboratory, with a complex blend of flat/hilly, open/woody and coastal/continental terrain, swept by climatic gradients of temperature and moisture. In 2013, I launched a BES-supported project about the thermal ecology of Iberian lizards and managed to drive over much of the Iberian Peninsula in fairly little time. Not being a reptile specialist myself, I was confronted by the consistent observation that lizard populations occupied very different habitats across the known distribution of each of the ~ 25 known Iberian species belonging to the family Lacertidae.

For instance, the common wall lizard (Podarcis muralis) likes water, rocks and mountains, but you can find this pencil-long reptile at the top of a summit, along the slopes or riversides of shallow and deep ravines, on little stones barely surfacing above peatland grasslands, or among the bricks of buildings. These animals must experience different local climates conditional on where they live, and adapt their thermal physiology accordingly.

Having then started a postdoc in Miguel Araújo’s lab — a world-class site for global change ecology and ‘big’ biodiversity patterns — I reviewed a sizeable body of literature looking into large-scale gradients of thermal tolerance. Most of those papers had collated (mostly) one estimate of tolerance from each of tens to thousands of species, then mapped them against regional and global metrics of climate change through sophisticated mathematical frameworks. But these studies rarely accounted for population-level thermal tolerance.

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Categories : biodiversity, climate change, climate shift, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, decline, ecology, environmental policy, extinction, function, habitat loss, management, research, science, threatened species

Legacy of human migration on the diversity of languages in the Americas

12 09 2018

quechua-foto-ale-glogsterThis might seem a little left-of-centre for CB.com subject matter, but hang in there, this does have some pretty important conservation implications.

In our quest to be as transdisciplinary as possible, I’ve team up with a few people outside my discipline to put together a PhD modelling project that could really help us understand how human colonisation shaped not only ancient ecosystems, but also our own ancient cultures.

Thanks largely to the efforts of Dr Frédérik Saltré here in the Global Ecology Laboratory, at Flinders University, and in collaboration with Dr Bastien Llamas (Australian Centre for Ancient DNA), Joshua Birchall (Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Brazil), and Lars Fehren-Schmitz (University of California at Santa Cruz, USA), I think the student could break down a few disciplinary boundaries here and provide real insights into the causes and consequences of human expansion into novel environments.

Interested? See below for more details?

Languages are ‘documents of history’ and historical linguists have developed comparative methods to infer patterns of human prehistory and cultural evolution. The Americas present a more substantive diversity of indigenous language stock than any other continent; however, whether such a diversity arose from initial human migration pathways across the continent is still unknown, because the primary proxy used (i.e., archaeological evidence) to study modern human migration is both too incomplete and biased to inform any regional inference of colonisation trajectories. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Amazon, biogeography, connectivity, demography, ecology, ecosystem, Flinders University, mathematics, modelling, population dynamics, research, science, South America, statistics

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