I have three recent publications to share, all of which have me reflecting on my past few years of work.

Our climate change refugia conservation paper was published in mid-July. We started working on this paper during the full-blown pandemic uncertainty mode of April 2020. I’ve never written a paper with so many coauthors, and it was an honor to learn from this collection of scientists. All told, I only spent a handful of months at UMass for my climate change refugia postdoc, but the experience left a deep and lasting impression that influenced how I think about science, natural resource management, and social justice. Being able to work on climate change adaptation during the pandemic sustained my spirit and inspired me out of bed every morning with a sense of purpose during a transition-filled inflection point in my life (pandemic aside). It also left me with a profound sense of respect and appreciation for giant sequoia, Pacific fisher, late season snowpack, Sierran meadows I’ve never set foot in, and alpine plants that I may never get to see. While at UMass, I also got to collaborate with my colleagues on Ten Simple Rules for Productive Lab Meetings (as you might guess, our lab meetings were another enriching and edifying component of my brief time there).

The last paper documents work I did as a PhD student and postdoc with the Vermont Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, and has been years in the making: Remote ecological monitoring with Smartphones and Tasker. Building smartphones and using them as autonomous scientific data collection units was one of the trickiest parts of my early PhD work. For something that took up so much time and cognitive load, this merited only a scant few sentences in my doctoral dissertation and accompanying publications. It’s so rewarding that we now have an official record of our hardware efforts to share.

I’ll indulge in some nostalgia and highlight one of my favorite lines from this paper: “In preliminary testing, baking smartphones in a conventional oven yielded the insight that the devices consistently shut off when the internal temperature exceeded approximately 68°C.”

This sentence takes me back to humid Vermont summer days in 2015 when I was working with border collie-level focus to prepare our smartphones for a fall deployment in the Sonoran Desert. By that point in the project, I was frustrated figuring out the nuances of the phones – SO tired of trying to get them to cooperate and behave as something autonomous rather than as an item that expects to interact with a human hand every day, sick of my own mistakes (like the time I did a meticulous soldering job on all of my TRRS cables only to realize I had connected the wrong wires and rendered the day’s efforts entirely worthless), tired of all the equipment taking up precious space in my tiny bedroom, and constantly questioning whether I was really cut out for such a technical PhD. By that point in the project, my relationship with those phones had a clear analog to Gollum’s relationship with the ring. Baking them in an oven felt like an act of defiance and left me strangely giddy (although unlike throwing the ring back into the molten fires of Mount Doom, baking the phones yielded important information about their putative capacity in the desert heat, and helped us realize we’d need to incorporate a firmware modification for boot on power).

This paper also brings me back to our first trip out to deploy the phones and all the concomitant false starts, troubleshooting, and missteps we overcame. I remember sitting alone in a quiet corner of the BLM field office at the end of that long week, apprehensively opening the first audio files that had been wirelessly transmitted from our remote smartphone stations. I heard the harsh, raspy song of a black-tailed gnatcatcher – one of the focal species we were hoping to acoustically capture – and then laid my head on the desk and cried happy tears. I played it over and over again for a few minutes, privately convincing myself it was real and savoring our success, before sending an excited email to my project colleagues.

That’s probably enough rambling. I’ll end with this: the three papers that came out this year reflect three disparate project experiences that have connected me with many bright, tenacious, creative, patient, and kind human beings over the past several years. Collaborating with these people is what gives me hope that we have the capacity to solve many of the major societal challenges we collectively face. I have been incredibly privileged to get to do this meaningful and challenging work and hope to keep doing it for a long time. If you made it this far, thank you for reading.