Lisa Lenoble Walsh

Calls to address fieldwork safety that began in the 1980s have been amplified and expanded in the past decade by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and US federal funding agencies. Now, research on fieldwork safety and resulting recommendations are largely siloed by scientific discipline, limiting the spread of data and discussion that could yield rapid change for field research. This review synthesizes literature on fieldwork safety across scientific disciplines, highlighting four facets of safety for leaders and researchers to address: physical, social, financial, and psychological. Literature and real-life events demonstrate that the four facets of safety are interconnected and should be considered together. The review concludes with a synthesis of recommendations for each facet of safety. This review provides principal investigators with accessible, data-driven resources and propose a framework for future research on field safety that will enable cross-disciplinary sharing.

Numerous quantitative studies in science education found that student engagement declined after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but analyses to identify the factors that drove emotional engagement down are lacking. Emotional engagement is a multidimensional construct composed of interest in an academic discipline, value in an academic course, and anxiety. Here, we use qualitative analysis to examine how and why the emergency shift from face-to-face to online classes during and after the pandemic-induced emergency remote transition impacted student emotional engagement. We coded student responses to open-ended questions using an emotional engagement framework and compared them between March and May 2020. Students’ survey responses indicate that their positive attitudes toward science and value in the course declined. In contrast, more students expressed negative values of the course in the post-survey, with students mainly critiquing instructors and learning. This qualitative analysis offers a deeper understanding of students' emotional challenges during this educational upheaval and suggests effective teaching strategies for future crises.

Societal Impact Statement: Humans are dependent upon plants for oxygen, food, textiles, and medicines. Climate change and deforestation represent serious threats to our planet, causing significant disruptions to our ability to access and utilize these plant resources; this makes a botanically literate workforce and plant science careers more important than ever. Unfortunately, the current state of botanical career opportunities and training programs in the United States remains unclear. This study focuses on the current employment trends of government and private sector botanists and what skills future plant scientists will need to be successful in these careers.Summary: Plant science plays a crucial role in our society and in ongoing efforts to address many global challenges, including food insecurity and climate change. Yet, despite a predicted increase in plant science career opportunities in the United States, the botanical career landscape outside of academia is not well understood. To further our understanding of the training required for non‐academic botanical careers, the botanical sub‐disciplines used on the job, and career challenges faced by plant scientists, we surveyed 61 scientists working in government and 59 scientists working in the private sector in the United States. In both career sectors, > 80% of survey participants reported recent hires at the bachelor's degree level. New personnel with master's degrees were more commonly reported in the government sector (95%) than in the private sector (69%). Most plant scientists working in government reported a focus on plant ecology and resource management. By contrast, most industry/non‐profit work involved horticulture and biotechnology, with some specific skills spanning both sectors. Notably, one prediction made nearly a decade ago appears to be manifesting: plant scientists seem to be retiring more quickly than they are being replaced. Survey respondents reported that attempts to hire full‐time staff are met with obstacles, including insufficient funding. Plant science professionals in both career sectors emphasized their routine use of botanical skills developed as students, highlighting the need for effective training at the undergraduate level. We discuss the implications of these findings and present several recommendations for preparing future generations of plant scientists and increasing the scientific community's botanical capacity.

Societal Impact Statement: Botanical careers are more important than ever, given that environmental challenges such as climate change and deforestation threaten plants daily and because plants contribute to solutions to these problems. Plants act as our sources of food, medicine, textiles, and oxygen, which means finding ways to mitigate these environmental challenges is crucial. Despite this, little is known about what career opportunities exist for botanists outside of academia and how well academia is training graduate students for these careers. This study centers on the current state of academic botanical careers and how well students completing post‐baccalaureate degrees (herein referred to as graduate students) are being prepared to fill careers within the botanical workforce.Summary: Plant science plays a crucial role in our society and in ongoing efforts to address many global challenges, including food insecurity and climate change. Despite a predicted increase in botanical career opportunities, little is known about how well academia is training graduate students for careers outside of academia. To further our understanding of the current state of academic training for botanical careers, we surveyed 85 faculty and 40 graduate students working in academia in the plant sciences in the United States. We found that the top challenges to university professors in academia are lack of support staff and funding, whereas students completing their post‐baccalaureate degrees cited finances and lack of supportive mentoring as their top challenges. Despite the fact that most graduate students surveyed wanted a career at a research‐intensive university, many botanists in academia are retiring without being replaced by more botanists. Faculty expertise is also misaligned with needs from industry and government employers, causing challenges to training graduate students for these careers outside of academia. Although our data point to a lack of career opportunities within academia, we also note that current graduate student education still emphasizes such careers and is not properly preparing graduate students for the careers they are more likely to obtain within the private and government sectors. We discuss the implications of these findings and present several recommendations for preparing future generations of plant scientists for more realistic career trajectories.

The composition of North American communities is changing due to anthropogenic land-use alteration. Mammalian mesopredators’ ability to consume anthropogenic trash due to their generalist diet has been referenced to partially explain their success in altered landscapes as they spread northward. We evaluated this assumption using carbon isotope values (δ¹³C) of the Virginia opossum ( Didelphis virginiana (Kerr, 1792)), a mesopredator expanding its range. δ¹³C values increase from consumption of C₄ plants, including corn, a common food additive in North America. Opossum hairs from the Midwestern U.S. and Northeast were evaluated using generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) to compare the predictive performances between winter harshness variables and anthropogenic variables. We also evaluated δ¹³C values through time to test if the temporal pattern of increased corn additives is mirrored in northern opossums. The best-performing GLMM included year and percentage corn fields as positive covariates. Variance in δ¹³C values increased exclusively in the “cornbelt” Midwest after 1970. δ¹³C values compared across space and time bolster evidence for the influence of agricultural development on the opossum’s range expansion.

Authentic research experiences (AREs) are a powerful strategy for inspiring and retaining students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. However, recent demand for virtual learning has emphasized the need for remote AREs that also foster a sense of community and interpersonal connections among participants. Here, we describe an ARE activity that leverages digitized diet data from natural history collections to provide students with collaborative research experience across any learning environment. Using magnified photographs of frog stomach contents collected in the Peruvian Amazon, we designed an open‐source “bowl game” competition that challenges students to identify, measure, and compare diet items across vouchered frog specimens (“Batrachian Barf Bowl”). To demonstrate learning outcomes, we ran this activity with 39 herpetology class students from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Michigan. We used pre‐ and post‐activity assessments to evaluate effectiveness, scientific accuracy of results, and impact on student well‐being. With minimal preparation and training in invertebrate identification, students were successful in identifying hundreds of frog diet items to taxonomic order, although accuracy varied among clades (global accuracy ~70%). While we found no difference in science identity, community, or self‐efficacy between the two institutions at either time point (pre‐ and post‐activity), we found that well‐being was significantly higher for both sets of students after the activity. Overall, this approach offers a model for combining active learning with museum collections to provide experiential research opportunities that highlight the power of scientific collaboration.

The majority of academic institutions were underprepared for a global pandemic, leading to spikes in instructor anxiety and drops in student engagement with STEM courses. With many STEM professors teaching online for the first time, they independently sought out training in distance education and inclusive teaching practices.

Academic integrity establishes a code of ethics that transfers over into the job force and is a critical characteristic in scientists in the twenty-first century. A student’s perception of cheating is influenced by both internal and external factors that develop and change through time. For students, the COVID-19 pandemic shrank their academic and social environments onto a computer screen. We surveyed science students in the United States at the end of their first COVID-interrupted semester to understand how and why they believed their peers were cheating more online during a pandemic. Almost 81% of students indicated that they believed cheating occurred more frequently online than in-person. When explaining why they believed this, students touched on proctoring, cheating influences, and extenuating circumstances due to COVID-19. When describing how they believed cheating occurred more frequently online, students touched on methods for cheating and surreptitious behavior. The student reasonings were associated with four theories (game theory, Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, neutralization theory, and planned behavior theory) that have been used to examine academic dishonesty. Our results can aid institutions in efforts to quell student concerns about their peers cheating during emergencies. Interestingly, most student beliefs were mapped to planned behavior theory while only a few students were mapped to neutralization theory, suggesting it was a novel modality of assessment rather than a pandemic that shaped student perceptions.