Doing Science in Fits and Starts

****The following is another post from Wild Lens volunteer Virginia Schutte, an expert on mangrove conservation who has been working on an Eyes on Conservation video about her work in Panama.  Click here to check out her previous posts.****

For my first year as a grad student, I had some vague questions about nature that I blended to create an experiment. I stand behind that work, but it isn’t going to change science or conservation as we know it. Then, months later, as I was thinking about my results and reading about mangroves, project ideas just started flowing. That one burst of ideas formed the core of my entire dissertation and provided me with funding for several years.

I didn’t have any ideas for followup work until nearly the end of those projects- a gap of several years! I asked a seasoned professor in my department if he has learned to constantly produce the questions behind his experiments and he said his inspiration has come in discrete chunks for decades.

Another reason a researcher rarely works consistently on a single study is because of all the other duties required of them. At any given time, a scientist is likely expected to be doing some or all of the following for multiple projects: writing grant proposals, planning for the next field- or lab-work, collecting and analyzing data, and publishing results. If the person is in academia, they’re probably teaching as well. It takes real management skills to get it all done!

This year, our project team members have (collectively):

• -acquired funding and completed months of fieldwork for several other projects
• -traveled to multiple states and continents to maintain collaborations already in progress
• -moved to a different continent and had a baby (this one is for me!)

But the project I was filming is finally back in focus. We’re analyzing results and beginning to write up what we found. Stay tuned for a science update!