BioDiverse Perspectives: Blogging to foster communication among graduate students

Background/Question/Methods

Science outreach has grown rapidly in the past several years, especially in the field of ecology. In addition to traditional peer-reviewed outlets, scientists can now communicate their work through media such as blogs, Twitter, and Facebook and to a variety of audiences. Much of this effort has been focused on communicating research to citizens, and most of it is accomplished by academic professionals. As the next generation of researchers, graduate students occupy a unique position in science: well-educated, but not quite at the level of a full-fledged researcher. Outside of professional meetings or in classes at their own institutions, they lack an accessible “safe space” in which to explore topics in ecology together, especially in the public realm. 

Results/Conclusions

We developed and launched a new blog, BioDiverse Perspectives (http://www.biodv.com/), to provide a forum for graduate students worldwide to interact on the topic of biodiversity science. Each post, written by a graduate student, highlights a specific paper that has laid the foundation for biodiversity science, helped to progress or synthesize our knowledge of the field, or proposed new frontiers of investigation. Since the blog came online in January 2013, we have had over 15,000 views and over 100 comments on 31 posts. An international network of authors includes students from the U.S., Brazil, China, Kenya, and Spain. Moving forward, we aim to expand the types of content to further discussion and involvement among students, including an interview series with authors of highlighted papers, a weekly link dump of recently released papers, and guest posts by faculty. We hope to reach a wide audience of fellow graduate students by providing a space for intellectual interaction, to introduce new ideas and concepts, and to foster a sense of global community among the next generation of biodiversity scientists.