Limnology and Oceanography Bulletin最新文献

A sense of kuleana (personal responsibility) in caring for the land and sea. An appreciation for laulima (many hands cooperating). An understanding of aloha 'āina (love of the land). The University of Hawai'i at Manoa hosted the 2023 Ecological Dissertations in Aquatic Sciences (Eco-DAS) program, which fostered each of these intentions by bringing together a team of early career aquatic ecologists for a week of networking and collaborative, interdisciplinary project development (Fig. 1).

The Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) sponsors Eco-DAS, which is now in its 30th year. The program aims to unite aquatic scientists, develop diverse collaborations, and provide professional development training opportunities with guests from federal agencies, nonprofits, academia, tribal groups, and other workplaces (a previous iteration is summarized in Ghosh et al. 2022). Eco-DAS XV was one of the largest and most nationally diverse cohorts, including 37 early career aquatic scientists, 15 of whom were originally from 9 different countries outside the United States (Fig. 2). As the first cohort to meet in-person since the COVID-19 pandemic, Eco-DAS participants convened from 5 to 11 March 2023 to expand professional networks, create shared projects, and discuss areas of priority for the aquatic sciences. During the weeklong meeting, participants developed 46 proposal ideas, 16 of which will be further developed into projects and peer-reviewed manuscripts.

Although many of these themes are not novel, they reiterate the challenges and opportunities that emerging aquatic scientists face. Importantly, these themes prevail in the global field of aquatic ecology and highlight the need to continue collaboratively exploring the way forward.

Participants were highly enthusiastic to continue to develop ideas collaboratively and there is no doubt that novel contributions to science will be made in the coming years as a result of this symposium. However, Eco-DAS XV was more than just science, networking, and proposals; it was a constructive experience and marked the beginning of a big ohana (family). Our cohort was not only a group of like-minded researchers at similar career stages, but also a group that quickly connected with one another on different levels beyond “science and careers.” It was a group of amazing people who will have a brilliant future in aquatic sciences together—because the connections created during the week will last a year (Kelly et al. 2017), decades, or even a lifetime!

Digital imaging technologies are increasingly used to study life in the ocean. To deal with the large volume of image data collected over space and time, scientists employ various machine learning and deep learning algorithms to perform automated image classification. Training of classifiers requires a large number of expertly curated sets of images, a time-consuming process that requires taxonomic knowledge and understanding of the local ecosystem. The creation of these labeled training sets is the critical bottleneck for building skillful automated classifiers. Here, we discuss how we overcame this barrier by leveraging taxonomic knowledge from a group of specialists in a workshop setting and suggest best practices for effectively organizing image annotation efforts. In our experience, this 2 day workshop proved very insightful and facilitated classification of over 4 years of plankton images obtained at Scripps Pier (La Jolla, CA), focusing on diatoms and dinoflagellates. We highlight the importance of facilitating a dialog between taxonomists and engineers to better integrate ecological goals with computational constraints, and encourage continuous involvement of taxonomic experts for successful implementation of automated classifiers.

It is a fact of life that there will always be people who are more accomplished, more productive, more organized, more articulate, more creative (more you name it) than we. Whether we like it or not, what others do matters to us because it sets the context to our own activity and performance. This is true in all walks of life, just talk to anyone who is trying to develop a career in sports, music, dance, or as a YouTube influencer. We deal with this reality in many different ways, some positive and some quite negative. In this regard, in academia and research we have a particularly pervasive tendency to compare ourselves to our peers, friends, and sometimes nemeses. The reason I think this is the case is because the very foundation of contemporary academia and research rests on the premise of comparison and competition (often for scarce funding resources, jobs, and sometimes even ideas). The system is based on ranking things (people, projects, papers, ideas) along gradients of perceived merit, publication output, realized (and very often constructed or manipulated) impact, funding success, progression, networking ability, student popularity, social media impact, and the list goes on. Needless to say these rankings, metrics, and comparisons have a strong bearing on our professional careers, and this is why we care so much, but clearly they also have a profound emotional, personal, and psychological impact as well, one that we seldom discuss or consider. I think we need to talk more about this.

Peer review, accountability, rigor, transparency, and relevance are indeed some of the pillars of our academic and research system, but competition and the ensuing comparison have taken a disproportionate and rather perverse center role, and this has some negative consequences. There is nothing wrong with admiring and looking up to highly talented, accomplished people, and from learning from colleagues or friends who are gifted and proficient at things we may struggle with. After all, is this not what good mentorship is all about? It is not about preaching, imposing, or coercing, but about offering humble examples of positive traits; mentees who are receptive benefit greatly by learning from these examples, at least I think I have. What is confusing and often becomes negative is feeling the need to be as good as those people because this is what the system requires, or being frustrated because we are not. There is a fundamental difference between the desire to do better, within our possibilities and context, and the sense of having to be something or someone we are not, yet the system sometimes encourages us towards the latter. In this regard, one insidious behavior that further compounds the problem in research and academia is that we tend to compare ourselves to others but one dimension at a time: If a colleague is highly productive in terms of papers or grants, we compare ourselves to that dimension. If a colleague seems to be highly regarded and