Paper has its limits. For instance, a paper field guide: 

-Can only include so much information before it is no longer a field guide and instead a desk reference.

-Can only have the information organized in one way, with one or two indices at the rear to guide the user to the information they are looking for.

-Can only be updated when the author and publisher choose to release a new edition.

-Can only be published and distributed in one, or at most two, languages at a time.

This week in the Books et al. section of Science, I explore some of the incredible opportunities for re-imagining how we construct field guides made possible by the advent of mobile technology. I do so through the lens of the fantastic new field guide Map of Life, one of the most impressive efforts to provide on-demand access to biodiversity information. This is the first time that Science has reviewed a mobile application; there is no doubt in my mind that this will not be the last time.

The review is by no means exhaustive in exploring all of the important considerations that go into making these applications and I am looking forward to many interesting discussions as we push these ideas forward.

My thanks to Walter Jetz and Rob Guralnick for providing additional information on Map of Life and to a host of colleagues including Ken Feeley, Brian Enquist, Jens-Christian Svenning, and Chelsea Little for feedback on the review.

Goldsmith, G.R. 2015. The field guide, rebooted. Science 349: 594.

There is a growing movement towards using the web for educational outreach in the sciences. The unfortunate truth is that no one really knows whether or not it is working.

We have a new paper out this week  in the journal Ecosphere, the open access journal of the Ecological Society of America. I have contributed a guest post to their blog Ecotone, describing what we have done in greater detail. 

If you want to go straight to the source, you can access the paper from ESA here: 

Goldsmith, G.R., A.D. Fulton, C.D. Witherill, & J.F. Espeleta. 2014. Improving the efficacy of web-based educational outreach in ecology. Ecosphere 5: 131.

The core data underlying the paper is published in the Dryad Digital Data Repository, which is also open access and can be accessed here: Goldsmith, G.R., A.D. Fulton, C.D. Witherill, & J.F. Espeleta. 2014. Data from: Improving the efficacy of web-based educational outreach in ecology. Dryad Digital Data Repository.

I strongly support moving towards more integrative methods for measuring the impact of scientific research. Historically, the measure of success has been simply counting the number of times a research article was cited by other research articles. While interesting, there has been a very interesting and promising movement towards "altmetrics," which tries to take a more inclusive approach to how research is consumed by both academic and non-academic communities.  

One of the most promising aggregators for altmetrics has been Impactstory, a non-profit initiated in 2011. Until today, I maintained my Impactstory profile on this website with my list of publications. But in a series of blog posts in July and August, Impactstory announced that they would begin charging for their services. 

By monetizing their services, Impactstory forced me to assess whether I thought I would experience sufficient return for my investment. At present, there is no evidence that people value my work more (i.e. will hire me) because I use Impactstory. However, I do want to support the growth of altmetrics and its long-term success. 

So, my publications page is now going to use the free altmetrics badges from "the competition" over at Altmetric.com. Even for those of us scientists who are not incredibly savvy to programming (this site is built on Weebly), adding the badges is incredibly simple following the instructions available on their website.

Ultimately, Altmetric.com, which won Elsevier's apps for science contest in 2011, appears to be pursuing a different business model. Rather than placing the cost of development on scientists, they are placing it on scientific publishers. While  Altmetric.com is for profit and Impactstory is non-profit, both are ultimately  businesses; I hope Impactstory's business model works...

I am privileged to be visiting with Nalini Nadkarni this week at the University of Utah. Nalini has an incredibly distinguished career in both science and science communication. One need look no further than this pile of field research notebooks to understand that she has truly dedicated her life to understanding the ecology of tropical montane cloud forests. For me, opening these old books has brought nothing but new ideas for research. That we are doing new science- based on data collected over 25 years ago -speaks to just how meticulous Nalini was in the field. If I have learned nothing from this week, it is how incredibly valuable it can be to spend just a few extra minutes at the end of the day writing those seemingly obvious details down...you never know who will be reading it in the future. 

A few years ago, the servers in the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University were hacked and thousands of emails from the climate scientists working there were copied. The emails were anonymously uploaded onto various servers and subsequently delivered to the media. The timing was coincident with a major climate change policy meeting (the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen) and portions of text form the emails were selected so as to make it appear that the scientists were engaging in scientific misconduct. The story quickly gained traction in the international media. Multiple different independent investigations found no evidence for misconduct on the part of the scientists whose emails had been illegally accessed, but this process took many months. How do we study the interest in, and impact of, such events on the public's perception of climate science? 

My colleague Bill Anderegg and I have been using Google Trends to try to make sense of events and trends in climate science communication. The result is a new (open access) paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Effectively, Google Trends allows us to look at how the number of searches in Google for climate change related queries varies across space and time. A couple of ideas to take away from our results:

1) Public interest in climate change, as measured by the volume of searches for the issue, has decreased significantly since a peak in 2007. The evidence for serious anthropogenic climate change has only gotten worse during this time. 

2) The public searches for "global warming," not the more comprehensive "climate change." As a community, we need to use the search terms that are being engaged by the public.

3) Major climate communication events, positive or negative, generally have a very short half-life in the media. A few days at best. 

4) Google Trends is the harbinger of a new era for the study of effective science communication, in that it can provide open access to historical and real time information on public interest in a topic. It's a great complement to traditional survey methods. 

Ultimately, my hope is that our research serves as an example of how Google Trends can help improve the dialogue around climate change by providing insight into what the public is searching for information about, where they are, and when they are searching. 

Anderegg, W.L. and G.R. Goldsmith 2014. Public interest in climate change over the past decade and the effects of the 'climategate' media event. Environmental Research Letters 9, 054005.

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to ask Al Gore about the characteristics of the scientists who had been most effective in teaching him about complex science. I recently posed the same question to George Monbiot. Monbiot writes a column on the environment for the Gaurdian and recently authored a book about what it would look like to restore big animals to the environment. More about his answer in a moment...

                                                                     A wordcloud based on the most frequent words associated with the conference on                                                                      Twitter. I sampled 1500 tweets and show only the terms occurring >20 times. Thanks to                                                                                    the "twitteR" and "wordcloud" packages in R. 

This all occurred in the context of a three day conference on megafauna (big animals) that was convened at University of Oxford. The talks imagined a world full of mammoths, lions, bears, and bison. I am, decidedly, not an expert in anything that has to do with animals. But I also recognize that our planet looks the way it does (and may have looked very different in the not so distant past) because of big animals. I think that this knowledge informs my research. Perhaps of equal interest to me is the power of big animals to capture the public imagination. The idea of a world with woolly mammoths draws people to zoos, parks, museums, movies, and books. I think that we are drawn to the idea of a time when humans were not the most dangerous animal on the planet and the conservation implications are interesting to consider. 

Monbiot came to Oxford's Natural History Museum to provide a keynote for the conference on why we ought to consider putting big animals back where they belong. He is a masterful speaker. He opens with great energy. He is self-deprecating. He uses the stage well. And he has a way with the words that was the talk of the crowd afterwards. I appreciate the role that he plays in thinking about how to reconnect us with nature.  

And as for the most compelling aspect of Monbiot's response to my question about effective science communication? It was the idea of creating an arc in the story that leaves the audience in suspense, so that they wait just a little for the punchline. 

I had the opportunity to meet Al Gore last night following a lecture he delivered at the Oxford Martin School on key drivers of global change. Gore is certainly among the most dedicated and influential advocates for action on climate change and he has rightfully been recognized as such. I asked Gore one question, which he answered without hesitation:

Question: What are the characteristics of the scientists that have been most effective in teaching you about the science of climate change? 

Answer: The scientists with dedication to rigorous, accurate science and a passion for sharing that science. 

I think many scientists are a little wary of journalists bearing MP3 recorders. 

The most common fear among us generally seems to be that of saying something erroneous on record, which is amplified by the pressure of speaking extemporaneously, the appeal for clarity and brevity, and perhaps a simple desire to say something interesting without the myriad qualifiers that are inherent to our research. Many others have written very eloquently about strategies for learning to communicate with journalists, but from my perspective, it's largely a matter of practice and learning from my mistakes. 

During a recent trip to Peru, I had the opportunity to get to know Justin Catanoso, the director of the journalism school at Wake Forest University. Justin was mad enough to visit our field research sites for a project he is doing on climate change in the Andes. A few of the early products are coming out on National Geographic Newswatch, WUNC radio and WFDD radio. In addition to digging into the complicated issues around the implications of climate change for tropical forests, he does great justice to the physically taxing nature of collecting the data.   

Speaking with Justin was a great chance to 'practice' working with a communications professional. You can listen to a segment where I speak about the role that tropical forests play in the water cycle through this link on WFDD.