Advice From the Field: Practical Skills, Challenges, and How to Support Early Career Ecologists

Abstract

Conducting fieldwork, or collecting data in an outdoor setting, is a common experience for many in ecology. While fieldwork inherently requires training in data collection methodology, field ecology often requires knowledge of social, cultural, organizational, and other practical skills that are not associated with the scientific method but are just as critical to an ecologist's success and well-being in a field setting. These skills are not readily recognized for their importance in fieldwork and are not developed with the same attention as those typically associated with research, such as proficiency with sampling equipment. However, this approach can negatively impact both the research itself and experience of ecologists, especially for those new to the field.

To address this gap, nine field ecologists from varied backgrounds gave presentations in a session focused on providing fieldwork advice during the 107^th Ecological Society Annual Meeting in Montréal, Québec, Canada. The primary goal for this session was for speakers to share practical lessons and advice learned from their own experiences. The speakers shared skills they wished they had learned prior to conducting fieldwork and how they navigated assumptions around physical, mental, and social expectations in the field. In addition, they discussed how they overcame deficits in knowledge considered “commonplace” by those with experience in the outdoors, as well as other personal and professional barriers to conducting successful fieldwork in ecology. By doing so, the speakers aimed to address and minimize barriers to ecologists beginning their careers, especially those who have limited or no experience preparing for fieldwork, and for whom fieldwork may present unique challenges. The content of the presentations is summarized by the participating speakers in the following sections, with points addressed during the audience “Question and Answer” portion of the session reviewed in the discussion section.

In their talk, Dr. Ezra Kottler discusses some of the specific challenges faced by transgender and gender-nonconforming scientists in doing fieldwork safely. They note that, while there have been important strides made in gender parity in ecology thanks to the trailblazing work of many amazing women ecologists, our field is only beginning to acknowledge and address the experiences of queer ecologists who do not fit into the gender binary. Ezra's expertise on this issue comes from personal experience, as halfway through their PhD program they came out as transgender and nonbinary and began to use a new name and pronouns. Being the first transgender scientist in many of the research settings they worked in, they had to do a lot of self-advocacy to access resources and supports they needed to succeed in their graduate program. They are now working to lessen barriers for all transgender field scientists through the Trans and Gender-nonconforming Fieldwork Alliance.

Ezra described some of the major challenges for transgender ecologists in the following areas: travel, fieldwork locations, and home institutions.

Dr. Michelle Talal is a Zuckerman Postdoctoral Scholar at Tel Aviv University. She is an urban ecologist who investigates biodiversity, visitor preferences, and sustainable management in cities. Prior to her postdoctoral research, she worked as an environmental consultant and health and safety coordinator for a range of environmental projects.

Can you think of a time when you encountered a hazard on the job? Perhaps you brushed up against some poison ivy or got overheated during a long day in the field. It is possible that you did not anticipate a soil pit ahead of you or got lost during an afternoon on a winding forest trail? In her talk, Michelle explained how we are often excited to begin our ecological field research right away and start collecting data, but some basic preparation can prevent us from exposing ourselves and our coworkers to a range of potentially dangerous situations.

Michelle discussed how there are many hazards that we may encounter in the field such as exposure to cold/heat stress and hazardous materials/chemicals at contaminated sites. We may also encounter infectious diseases caused by viruses, bacteria, parasites, and/or fungi that may be transferred to us by direct/indirect contact, food, or vectors such as mosquitos and ticks (Mayo Clinic 2022). In addition, there may be unexpected visitors present at our field sites, such as other people or non-human animals.

These unforeseen circumstances may result in fascinating and/or humorous stories to tell our family and friends, but unfortunately, many workers have experienced injury and even death on the job. According to the National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI), the agricultural, forestry, fishing, and hunting industry category has a higher-than-average fatal injury rate (U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics 2022). Our work as ecologists is not exclusively related to this industry category, but it is important to consider our potentially overlapping risks since we may have similar tasks and working environments.

In summary, Michelle emphasized that we, as scientists, need to remember to expect the unexpected, prepare for our fieldwork to reduce potential injury and/or death, and most importantly, to enjoy the adventure.

Dr. Pacifica Sommers grew up camping often with her family. Although there were many stepping stones that helped her build from a weekend camping trip in the local mountains to weeks of camping in Antarctica for her postdoctoral research, she had the advantage of building on a solid base of experience with many outdoors skills, such as how to effectively layer for warmth and how to relieve oneself without a toilet in sight. This is a skill set many students who could excel at fieldwork do not have the opportunity to build with their families.

To create a more diverse and inclusive field of ecology in the future, we need to provide opportunities for young scientists to experience the adventure of expeditions, exploration, and discovery in a positive and encouraging way. So get out there and take some young scientists with you!

Even under the best circumstances, fieldwork can be chaotic. Tools break, tires go flat, weather happens, or something else unexpected occurs. Planning for these contingencies takes ingenuity and focus, as does enacting those backup plans once your original plan fails. But what happens when you have a condition characterized by, among other things, trouble focusing and difficulty enacting plans even when you have spent hours making them? In her talk, Dr. Cait Rottler talked about the challenges she has faced navigating fieldwork with ADD, as well as some of her coping strategies for dealing with them. The challenges Cait noted can primarily be sorted into two groups: pre-fieldwork challenges, such as in planning, dealing with logistics, and gathering field equipment, and during-fieldwork challenges, such as keeping track of data and samples, dealing with the unexpected, and maintaining focus.

Scientists who do fieldwork are not just limited to papers and theories. They also have the opportunity to materialize their ideas and make discoveries by exploring some of the most breathtaking places on Earth. However, the journey to the field is not without its challenges, and the period before embarking on a trip, known as the “pre-field season,” can be a source of immense stress and anxiety. During the “pre-field season,” scientists write a thousand lists, pack their instruments, notebooks, food, batteries, and everything their backpack can fit. It is also when ideas flourish, anxiety arises, and we discover the world of multiple indescribable emotions. This chaos is understandable when we realize that fieldwork is the peak of a protracted process of reading, writing, brainstorming, discussing, and doing all these things repeatedly to find the right questions, informative hypotheses, and adequate methodologies through iteration.

For Lina, a PhD student at the University of Miami, there is one caveat; there is no amount of preparation that can fully ready you for the field! Every field season is a new opportunity to gain experience, learn, and grow. The field offers improvement in at least six skills transforming us over and over again into better researchers.

The first skill is resourcefulness. Before going to the field, we do the math and pack extra things in case we find something we did not consider, or the environment is more challenging. Despite our carefulness, we cannot plan for unforeseeable events and the possibility of things and plans breaking apart. Moreover, when something happens, we cannot stop for the day. We need to find a way to achieve our goal with what we have at hand. Remember, a Google search will not be possible, and the phone-a-friend option to call our advisor unfeasible. This is the moment in which our abilities to solve puzzles, build a Lego set, bake, or whatever you can think of become our best allies to fulfill our dream without the things we should have brought.

The second skill is teamwork. There is no better and riskier opportunity to improve our team skills than during fieldwork. The field requires long hikes if you are in the forest, the ability to breathe at high altitude if you are up in the Andes mountains, extensive hours under the sun if you want to study aquatic mammals, and a ton of different abilities depending on the organisms you study. Most of the time, you are never alone. We work in groups of at least two, and sometimes up to 10. We make decisions and solve problems at every step. To endure this, we should be able to navigate difficult conversations and to understand other people's boundaries and capabilities. We should be humble enough to recognize what we and our teammates can and cannot do. Fieldwork is the perfect time to improve our communication skills, be willing to deeply listen, and to care for others and ourselves without hesitation.

While in the field, we also need to be curious, flexible, and creative. Nature tells stories that we can only read when we stop to observe, hear, and touch without eagerness. This is our time to be a child again, asking why as often as we want. Our curiosity, the third skill, will allow us to ask significant and interesting questions to the organism we study and the environment in which they live. Flexibility, the fourth skill, is required because the weather tends to be unpredictable, internet access is uncommon, and risks can be fairly common. You should be capable of adapting, not transforming the environment to fit your needs, and accommodating yourself to the environment in which you are. You should be capable of unfolding even plan Z. You need to be creative, the fifth skill, because the story told by organisms and their ecosystems can be quite different from the one you wrote for the proposal. Sometimes the field requires an entirely different plot, and we should be able to ask other types of questions and look for their answers.

Finally, going to other human beings' homes requires epistemic humility. This is the sixth skill and one of the most important. We tend to go to places we describe as remote and difficult to access. However, those places are the homes and territories of other human beings, including Indigenous communities. We for sure know something about these places and can study them. Nevertheless, we should be aware that no one understands these places better than the communities that live there. We should be open to hearing them, to learn from them. We should be willing for them to guide and actively participate in the research process. We should recognize that this is a learning process in two ways in which every part has something to offer and something to learn. We will be truthful collaborators and not just information stealers by acknowledging that we do not know everything and that there is still a world to discover through others' eyes.

Lina's invitation is to see your fieldwork as a fruitful challenge. A challenge in which you become a better researcher. This challenge requires you to solve problems and achieve dreams with what you have at hand. It also requires thoughtful work in building psychologically safe teams willing to have difficult conversations, clear communication, and awareness of every team member's capability, including your own. You should be curious to keep discovering the world you live in, flexible to unforeseen changes, and creative to build from scratch. Finally, it is a unique and amazing time to be humble learners, capable of engaging in safe, fun, and honest collaboration with those that know better the places and organisms we aim to study. So, are you ready to take on the challenge and discover the world through a new lens?

The journey of motherhood, a choice both deliberate and sometimes unforeseen, holds a significant place. Dr. Tara Bishop exemplifies the fusion of being a dedicated field ecologist and a mother, emphasizing the importance of defining one's motivations for career choices. With two children in under 3 years, Tara left her teaching job and started her PhD focusing on desert plant ecology. This shift prompted a critical introspection into her aspirations, underscoring the need to reconcile her love for her previous role with her desire to embark on new endeavors. She had to identify her “why.” Tara invites all who are thinking about graduate school and/or career changes to identify their “why” for doing so. This foundation stabilized her through much of the growing pains, which are uncomfortable and exhausting, that are required to shift traditional paradigms of parental roles within a family. Decisions, planning, implementation, and adjustments have taken years of collective work from Tara and her husband Michael Bishop. After 14 years of marriage, Michael shares that while it is important to normalize conversations and ask questions about co-parenting, men who traditionally do not “know” about managing a household have resources besides their partners to figure that out. Husbands can research how best to deal with the laundry or plan chores for the kids without adding to their wife's mental load, which is often unjustly heavier.

Fieldwork can be a critical component of a graduate program experience, but few programs provide explicit training in the leadership and planning skills required for leading fieldwork as a graduate student. In her talk, Dr. Katherine Hayes introduced a survey developed by her and her collaborators to collect general advice for graduate students on leading fieldwork safely and effectively and solicit specific suggestions on resources and actions to take before, during, and after the field season. Using the survey responses, Kate and her co-authors developed a series of recommendations for labs, departments, and universities to better prepare and support their students.

Responses to the survey fell into three general categories: (1) team communication, (2) honest risk assessment, and (3) logistics and procedures. Team communication included any actions field leaders take to communicate with their crew or to encourage communication. Risk assessment referred to the actions that field leaders take to assess, identify, manage, and mitigate risk, both before and during the field season. Logistics and procedures included all formal or structural planning and management that a field leader is responsible for during the season. In her talk, Kate provided examples of actions that survey responses perceived as critical to graduate success within each of the three categories at each timestep of fieldwork. Specifically, perceived successful graduate field leaders set expectations and communicated goals openly, developed a safety plan, and completed any necessary training prior to the season. During the field season, graduate field leaders provided daily safety and well-being check-ins, monitored expectations, and enforced protocols like the buddy system. After the field season, survey responses identified that successful field leaders lead debriefs, provided letters of recommendation or other support, and took notes for future seasons.

Kate also presented recommendations for labs, departments, and universities in her talk; while the survey was not initially developed to identify potential policy suggestions, survey responses emphasized the importance of formal support from institutions. Labs, departments, and professional societies can support graduate student field leaders by formalizing institutional resources, providing financial support, and incentivizing skill development. Labs and PIs can support graduate student leaders by formalizing resources; labs can not only develop their own specific safety plans, field policies, and equipment checklists but also share past job advertisements and interview questions when useful. Departments and graduate programs can contribute by requiring graduate leaders to submit a safety plan prior to the field season. Financial support can also aid graduate field leaders in crucial ways. The cost of fieldwork can include gear, attire, or even transportation to the field sites, which may be prohibitive to many individuals; PIs can support their graduate students in the field by ensuring adequate pay and resources for assistants; labs can purchase extra supplies and gear or make it more available through gear swaps or other lending systems. Addressing the cost barrier will aid graduate student leaders by attracting high-quality applicants and promoting access across financial backgrounds. At the department or professional society level, groups can provide financial support to graduate students leading fieldwork by creating funding opportunities for training. Wilderness first-aid training, while potentially critical for field leaders, can be cost prohibitive for many students.

Finally, developing skills as a graduate field leader can be incentivized by treating the process as an important part of professional development. Graduate leaders who make an explicit effort to disrupt oppression, foster an equitable environment, and/or recruit a diverse applicant pool should be considered for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Strong field leadership is something to be included on curriculum vitae and considered in evaluations or award decisions. PIs and mentors can include details on strong field leaders in letters of recommendations, and departments could offer field leadership awards in the same vein as teaching or research awards.

Though she ultimately landed in the field of ecology, New Mexico State University PhD candidate Molly Reichenborn started her undergraduate education while working as a part-time zookeeper and initially viewed her degree as a means to advance within the zoological field. Graduate school was not something she was particularly aware of at the time, much less research, and did not consider this as a possibility until taking courses on restoration and plant ecology as a senior undergraduate. After moving into a master's program, the gap between the skills expected of a field-based researcher and her previous work experience contributed to delays in her graduate work, though the gap was not immediately recognized by her or her advisor.

Assumed prior knowledge in fieldwork is important for advisees to recognize, but even more so for their advisors. Graduate students, or anyone new to the field of ecology, may not have the personal or professional background to develop skills that are assumed to be known by those with this previous experience. Molly explained during her talk that her family rarely spent time recreating outdoors growing up. This contributed to a mismatch in understanding between her and her advisor, who did have these experiences both growing up and as an established field ecologist, about what skills she had under her belt before starting her graduate degree. Experience with outdoor skills indirectly related to field research can be unspoken and unconsciously assumed between advisors and advisees, which at best can lead to data collection errors or delays in project timelines, or at worst endanger the safety of students and others working with them in field settings. With advisors taking the lead to uncover assumptions of prior knowledge, advisors and advisees should work together to proactively close gaps in understanding before issues arise.

Following presentations, speakers answered audience questions on advice shared during the session and additional topics related to supporting ecologists in their field research. The main points of discussion included dealing with conflicts and group dynamics in the field, as well as supporting LGBTQ+ ecologists in hostile field settings.

Conflicts in field settings, especially when research sites are remote and/or team members are co-habitating, may create uncomfortable and even unsafe group dynamics. When asked how best to address these situations, the session speakers recommended a few options to address conflicts as they arise, and even better, strategies to avoid them in the first place. When conflicts arise, it can be helpful to discuss what could be underlying the problematic behaviors (e.g., is the person uncomfortable or dealing with personal strife) to better understand and address tension between team members. Conflicts can be proactively reduced by holding intentional discussions about acceptable behavior and a behavior contract signed by all team members (i.e., Team Charter) before the beginning of the field season. Pre-season discussions should also include sharing important personal comfort needs with sufficient lead time to accommodate or at least compromise to meet them, which can go a long way to support team morale and cohesion in a field setting.

In addition to areas that can be socially hostile to LGBTQ+ people, several countries explicitly consider these identities illegal. Faculty who conduct research in these places and wish to hire a qualified student who does not fit within “acceptable” identities poses a significant ethical pinch point without a clear way forward. Session speakers recognized that no options are a complete solution, but faculty members faced with this situation should support students in making the decision for themselves (e.g., where and in what situations they are comfortable working) by providing all information available, with particular emphasis on safety information in a given location. Treading the line between supporting advisee agency and maintaining supervisor responsibility to safety in these decisions is admittedly a tricky one, but holding frank discussions early on is important to avoiding unilateral decisions on the student's research and their safety. Extensive safety planning needs to be in place for locations where these threats are anticipated, and faculty must have an alternative option in a LGBTQ+ − safe location for students to build necessary skills if they decide the safety risk is too high. Projects that allow students to work with a trusted lab mate or team member can help support their success in difficult field locations.

The advice provided in these presentations and discussion cannot address the breadth of obstacles inhibiting accessible field research, but stands as one contribution toward minimizing these barriers. The authors hope that by providing actionable information on skills and experiences not commonly discussed in field ecology, ecologists new to field research will be better prepared to succeed, and their advisors will be better equipped to recognize and reduce barriers for their advisees.