Tag Archives: publishing

Dag Hessen: Communicating Science Through Children’s Literature

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Image Credit: Dag Hessen, University of Oslo

The past couple of years has seen younger generations become increasingly active with regards to environmental change. Recent protests worldwide, spearheaded by people like Greta Thunberg, have been incredibly encouraging to watch. So it’s important that scientists continue to improve our ability to communicate science to children.

On that note, I spoke to Dag Hessen, Norwegian ecologist and writer, who has published several science books, also successful children’s books. We spoke about the importance of explaining ecological concepts to children, the process of writing a book, and dealing with a different form of writing.

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Who Gets the Credit?

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Scientific papers nowadays are written more on computers than with ink and paper, but no matter how you write a paper it is important to distinguish who gets credit for what. (Image credit: Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0)

A huge component of science is the execution of successful experiments and then writing about those experiments. Consequently, a lot of weight is put on who did what, and what kind of credit people deserve for what they do. This can result in some arguments about how much so and so did for the project, and why they deserve authorship credit. In this article, I want to briefly cover some authorship issues and what kind of impact authorship can have on a scientist’s career.

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The Changing Face of Ecology: Part 1

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Ecology is a discipline that is constantly evolving. I spoke to (from top left to bottom right) Mark Davis, Madhur Anand, Paul Hebert, Andrew Hendry, Amy Austin and Bill Sutherland about the biggest changes they've seen in their careers

Ecology is a discipline that is constantly evolving. I spoke to (from top left to bottom right) Mark Davis, Madhur Anand, Paul Hebert, Andrew Hendry, Amy Austin and Bill Sutherland about the biggest changes they’ve seen in their careers (Image Credits: Mark Davis; Karen Whylie; Guelph University; Andrew Hendry; Amy Austin; British Ecological Society)

With so much of ecology focused on how the world around us is changing, it should come as no surprise that the discipline itself has undergone considerable transformation since its inception. And as with the world around us, many facets of ecology which are now commonplace were once a thing of the past.

Over the last 10 months, my colleague Kate Layton-Matthews and I have had the fortune to speak with a number of influential researchers in ecology, and there’s one question that we’ve always asked them: how has ecology changed over the course of your career? Here are some of their responses.

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