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1/11/17 23:21I am doing a group project with two other people to develop a restoration plan for a local park.
This is pretty tricky, because the park has a lot of obvious problems (invasives, too many shade-tolerant trees preventing oaks from growing, deer) and some of them cannot be solved within the budget of a smallish city park. We make jokes about introducing cougars, or fraternities with flamethrowers, but... we joke because we can't do it. And in addition, the land we're developing this plan for was set aside with the intention of keeping it preserved as it was in the time of the pioneers. Well, it was prairie potholes back then, and it's oak/maple/hackberry forest now, so we're definitely not getting it back to prairie potholes even if the neighbors were to tolerate us removing all that forest.
Anyway. I'd been very worried about being useless on the project because of my huge lack of scientific knowledge compared to my other group partners (one of whom is literally a SOFTWARE DEVELOPER and is developing a bunch of forest growth models for us), but I've been finding a lot of great articles in online databases, to the point that one of my partners wanted to know how I was able to find so much stuff without having that knowledge base of vocabulary.
First answer: The magic they teach you in library school.
Second answer: You keep on making your best guess at keywords until you find one good article, and that article teaches you enough vocabulary so that you can make a better guess at keywords until you find the next good article, and so on.
"But that takes a really long time."
Well, yes.
And then it occurred to me that I've accumulated a lot of trial-and-error tricks over the years for doing research in a language I'm not completely fluent in, especially when I was researching Sparks & Ashes. And maybe learning about alternative stable states and oak savannas is not so different from that.
The big lesson of Restoration Ecology is that there is some science where you can acquire a superficial understanding by reading Wikipedia and some science where you can't, and "hum a verse and I'll fake it?" is not a terrible strategy if it's the former.
This is pretty tricky, because the park has a lot of obvious problems (invasives, too many shade-tolerant trees preventing oaks from growing, deer) and some of them cannot be solved within the budget of a smallish city park. We make jokes about introducing cougars, or fraternities with flamethrowers, but... we joke because we can't do it. And in addition, the land we're developing this plan for was set aside with the intention of keeping it preserved as it was in the time of the pioneers. Well, it was prairie potholes back then, and it's oak/maple/hackberry forest now, so we're definitely not getting it back to prairie potholes even if the neighbors were to tolerate us removing all that forest.
Anyway. I'd been very worried about being useless on the project because of my huge lack of scientific knowledge compared to my other group partners (one of whom is literally a SOFTWARE DEVELOPER and is developing a bunch of forest growth models for us), but I've been finding a lot of great articles in online databases, to the point that one of my partners wanted to know how I was able to find so much stuff without having that knowledge base of vocabulary.
First answer: The magic they teach you in library school.
Second answer: You keep on making your best guess at keywords until you find one good article, and that article teaches you enough vocabulary so that you can make a better guess at keywords until you find the next good article, and so on.
"But that takes a really long time."
Well, yes.
And then it occurred to me that I've accumulated a lot of trial-and-error tricks over the years for doing research in a language I'm not completely fluent in, especially when I was researching Sparks & Ashes. And maybe learning about alternative stable states and oak savannas is not so different from that.
The big lesson of Restoration Ecology is that there is some science where you can acquire a superficial understanding by reading Wikipedia and some science where you can't, and "hum a verse and I'll fake it?" is not a terrible strategy if it's the former.