How You Can Help Out Ecology for the Masses

Posted on November 11, 2019 by Sam Perrin One comment

Here at Ecology for the Masses, we’re quite happy with the blog we’ve built up over the last year and a half. We’ve been able to publish three articles a week on an almost constant basis on what we think is pretty interesting content, and we’ve been rewarded with a decent readership and some great feedback from our audience.

You may know that almost 100% of our articles are written by PhD students. Yet what you probably don’t know is that most of us are heading into the final year of our PhDs, which makes time an absolute premium. We don’t want to reduce the blog’s output, yet the reality is that most of us simply won’t have time to publish on a regular basis as we head into 2020.

So What Can You Do to Help?

Don’t worry, we’re not starting a Patreon.

What we’re looking for at the moment are scientists who would like to write about ecology/conservation/sustainability-based topics, to help us keep up the blog going into the future. Our current authors are PhDs, but we’re looking for any early-career scientists who wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to get their views out to a wider audience. We’re looking for people who have the time and motivation to write once every one or two months.

If you fit that description, or have friends and colleagues that do, please get in touch. If you don’t have much experience writing blog articles, don’t worry, we’re more than happy to help you out there. If you’re looking for examples of some of our more popular recent pieces, take a look below.

We also conduct interviews with interesting ecologists on a regular basis, on everything from the hunting industry to ecological methods to environmental politics you can see all our interviews at this link. These interviews are a great way to sit down and get to know leading ecologists and hear their perspectives, and they’ve always taught us something new. If you have a scientist in mind that you think people should hear from, let us know and we can take you through our interview process.

We also publish a Paper of the Week every Wednesday, in which we take a recent ecological paper and make it accessible to the general public. So if you’ve come across a fascinating paper that you think more people need to hear about, or you’ve just landed your first publication in a journal, get in touch and you can either write up a summary yourself or we’ll have a crack at it.

Our readership at the moment is largely American, but we also have a lot of readers from Norway, Australia, Canada and the UK. We mainly use social media for outreach, and quite a few articles have been picked up and used by other bodies, as training materials in lectures or short courses or as press releases on other websites. We’ve also been lucky enough to have the folks over at Dynamic Ecology mention our articles every now and then.

We’ve had a great time building up this website to where it is today, and we want to keep delivering interesting content even as we head into the home stretch of our PhDs. So if you’d like to help us out, and want to get your work read, let us know! You can contact me at sam.perrin@ntnu.no or Adam at azhasik@email.uark.edu.