In this episode of BioScience Talks, we're joined by Dr. Michael Lesser, Professor Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire. He's here to talk about his recent BioScience article, which details the ways that coral is affected by nutrients, climate change, and other stressors— and what those interconnected stressors mean for the future of reefs.

The task of training an effective cadre of biodiversity scientists has grown more challenging in recent years, as foundational skills and knowledge in organismal biology have increasingly required complementary data skills and knowledge. Writing in BioScience, Dr. Anna K. Monfils, of Central Michigan University, and colleagues identify one way to address this training conundrum: biodiversity collections. Biodiversity collections operate at the nexus of foundational biological practice and contemporary data science, a product of their role as curator of not only specimens themselves but also the specimens' associated data and network of data resources (referred to as the "extended specimen").

            The authors describe a module that leverages this feature of biodiversity collections to produce a holistic student learning experience. The module, “Connecting students to citizen science and curated collections," was designed by the authors with six learning goals in mind, ranging from plant specimen collection in the field to the deposition of data in national or international databases. Students also learned about the value of large data sets and the role of community members' contributions to them.

            The authors reported strong learning results, stating that, according to a postmodule assessment, "the students felt well prepared, very well prepared, or totally prepared to use foundational and emerging plant collecting skills including maintaining a field notebook (89%), collecting specimens in the field (94%), and depositing specimens (89%) and digital data (92%) into national and international data repositories."

            Joining us on this episode are authors Anna Monfils, Professor at Central Michigan University and Director of the Central Michigan University Herbarium, Erica Krimmel, Information Scientist with the iDigBio Project at Florida State University, and Travis Marsico, Professor of Botany at Arkansas State University and Curator of the Arkansas State University Herbarium. They discussed the learning model they designed from implementation to next steps.

In this episode of BioScience Talks, we're joined by Liz Browne, who has bachelor of science degree with honors from the University of Tasmania, and Scott Carver, disease ecologist at the University of Tasmania. They discuss the pathogen transmission, and in particular, the way that Sarcoptes scabiei, the mite responsible for mange, passes between members of different species, as well as the implications for epidemiology generally. Learn more in their recent BioScience article.

In this episode of BioScience Talks, we're joined by previous guest Paolo D'Odorico, professor of hydrology and the Chair of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. We're also joined by Willis Jenkins, Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics at the University of Virginia, where he is also Chair of the Department of Religious Studies. Our guests discuss their recent article in BioScience water security and the ways that our values play into its management, with implications for Indigenous rights, DEI, ecosystem health, economies, environmental justice, and more. 

Over recent decades, community-based environmental monitoring (often called "citizen science") has exploded in popularity, aided both by smartphones and rapid gains in computing power that make the analysis of large data sets far easier. 

            Publishing in BioScience, handling editors Rick Bonney, of Cornell University, Finn Danielsen, of the Nordic Foundation for Development and Ecology (NORDECO), and numerous colleagues share an open-access special section (already downloaded thousands of times) that highlights numerous community-based monitoring programs currently underway. 

            In an article on locally based monitoring, Danielsen and colleagues describe the potential for monitoring by community members—who may have little scientific training—to deliver "credible data at local scale independent of external experts and can be used to inform local and national decision making within a short timeframe." 

            Community-based monitoring efforts also have the potential to empower Indigenous rightsholders and stakeholders through their broader inclusion in the scientific process, writes Bonney in a Viewpoint article introducing the section. Moreover, he says, "Indigenous and local peoples’ in situ knowledge practices have the potential to make significant contributions to meeting contemporary sustainability challenges both locally and around the globe." 

            In this episode of BioScience Talks, Bonney and Danielsen join us to discuss the special section as well as the broader future for community-based monitoring. DEI

This episode is the next in our oral history series, In Their Own Words. These pieces chronicle the stories of scientists who have made great contributions to their fields, particularly within the biological sciences and often as relates to DEI issues. Each month, we will publish in the pages of BioScience, and on this podcast, the results of these conversations. Nalini Nadkarni is a professor of biology at the University of Utah.  Note: Both the text and audio versions have been edited for clarity and length.

In a year marked by unprecedented flooding, deadly avalanches, and scorching heat waves and wildfires, the climate emergency's enormous cost—whether measured in lost resources or human lives—is all too apparent. Writing in BioScience, a group led by William J. Ripple and Christopher Wolf, both with Oregon State University, update their striking 2019 "World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency" with new data on the climate's health. The news is not good.

            Although fossil fuel use dipped slightly in 2020, a widely predicted result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors report that carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide "have all set new year-to-date records for atmospheric concentrations in both 2020 and 2021." Furthermore, 16 out of 31 tracked planetary vital signs, reflecting metrics such as greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat content, and ice mass, have also set disquieting records. However, there were a few bright spots, including fossil fuel subsidies reaching a record low and fossil fuel divestment reaching a record high.

            In this episode of BioScience Talks, coauthor Jillian Gregg, who is with the Sustainability Double Degree program and the Department of Crop and Soil Science at Oregon State University, joins us to discuss the latest climate update and the urgent actions needed ensure the long-term sustainability of human civilization.

 
Notes: For our discussion on extreme climate event attribution, we would like to clarify that current methods do not assess whether individual events are caused by climate change, but instead assess whether these events (floods, hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, fires) are larger, more intense, or more frequent, as a result of climate change.

Links to some of the resources we discuss:

• Carbon Brief summarizes extreme weather events
• Al Gore Climate Reality Training
• Exeter University YouTube on how they are becoming carbon neutral
• We refer to the "Princeton group," which is the Climate Central Surging Seas site for visualizing sea level rise

Historically, shared resources such as forests, fishery stocks, and pasture lands have often been managed with an aim toward averting "tragedies of the commons," which are thought to result from selfish overuse. Writing in BioScience, Drs. Senay Yitbarek (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Karen Bailey (University of Colorado Boulder), Nyeema Harris (Yale University), and colleagues critique this model, arguing that, all too often, such conservation has failed to acknowledge the complex socioecological interactions that undergird the health of resource pools.
The authors, who describe themselves as Blackologists (“'not simply scholars that are Black but, rather, are scholars who deliberately leverage and intersect Blackness into advancing knowledge production"), elucidate a model in which researchers' life experiences provide "unique perspectives to critically examine socioecological processes and the challenges and solutions that arise from them."
In this episode of BioScience Talks, Yitbarek, Bailey, and Harris join us to discuss this model of inclusive sustainability and the ways in which it can be brought to bear in service of ecosystems and the humans who inhabit them.

Please visit Dr. Bailey's podcast, The Creature Connection.
DEI

In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Charlie Fenster, Professor at South Dakota State University, Director of Oak Lake Field Station, and President of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), Dr. Pam Soltis of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida, Director of University of Florida Biodiversity Institute, AIBS Board Member, and Past President of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, and Paul Turner, Rachel Carson Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University and Microbiology Faculty Member at the Yale School of Medicine. They describe their recent article in BioScience, "Pandemic Policy in the Vaccine Era: The Long Haul Approach," in which they discuss vaccines, viral evolution, and the ways that the life sciences community must contribute to a robust international response in order to meet the present and future global challenges to human health and wellbeing. 

A discussion of environmental DNA and RNA (eDNA and eRNA, respectively) and its potential for pathogen monitoring. eDNA and eRNA approaches work through the collection of a sample (often from an aquatic source), whose genetic contents are then sequenced to reveal the presence and prevalence of pathogens. This conversation focuses on two cases, that of a herpesvirus that causes cancers among as turtles, and SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Our guests are Jessica Farrell and David Duffy of the University of Florida's Whitney Lab and Sea Turtle Hospital and Liam Whitmore, of the University of Limerick, in Ireland. 

Read the article in BioScience here.

The authors' case study is written up here.