About

Welcome to the ‘Early Career Ecologists’ blog!

This blog will be hosted, managed, and written by a collaborative group of early-career scientists. We work in a variety of systems (forests, wetlands, the arctic tundra, the desert) and study a variety of species (pines, microbes, fish, etc) all across the globe (from Alaska to Antarctica to East Africa). Most of us are working toward or have recently earned PhDs in Ecology.

The goals of this science blog are to:

1. Increase public awareness by promoting communication between researchers and the public
2. Provide a venue for early-career ecologists to communicate their science
3. Engage researchers from across many different fields
4. Promote interdisciplinary collaboration within the next generation of academics and researchers

As the newest generation of ecologists, we know that our research must be communicated and must be done so in an accessible, yet engaging, manner. A number of us recently participated in a Science Communication Training organized by The School of Global Environmental Sustainability (SoGES) at Colorado State University. This training was a part of SoGES’s Global Sustainability Leadership Fellowship program, which trains 20 PhD students and Post-Doctoral scholars to be innovators and leaders in science communication. This incredible training was administered by Liz Neeley (Thanks, Liz! @LizNeeley) at COMPASS (Compass Online). Generous support for this program was provided by SoGES, the Graduate Degree Program in Ecology, and The Center for Multiscale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes at Colorado State University.

Let’s just say, we were inspired!

Each of us cares deeply about our systems and our species. We’d like to encourage this enthusiasm and promote it beyond our tiny, academic circles. We know that no one can translate our work better than we can, but we need to learn to be better, more effective communicators. This blog is the place for us to do this. We will do our best to avoid jargon in our writing and will work to make our research accessible to each of our readers.

Please let us know if there are any topics you’d like to see addressed or ecologists you’d like to see featured. Also, take a moment to think about these questions: 1)What really matters to you? and 2) What do you want to know? We’re more than happy to (or attempt to) oblige.

Thanks for checking us out!

Sarah B. and the Early Career Ecologist Team

See our ‘Contributors’ page for the ecologists currently blogging for us. Or contact us at ecologists.earlycareer@gmail.com.