Jonanthan Myers
Associate Professor
What is something about science that people may not be aware of or do not understand?
“I'm thinking back to my high school days. Maybe the creativity aspect of it. When I was in high school, I felt like a lot of my textbooks in biology and science in general were presented in a very fact-based way. Like, ‘Scientists, you know, they do an experiment, they discover this.’ It seemed very dry and a very linear process. But there are many different ways to go about doing science and research. That's one thing I like about it; there are many different ways to be successful and you can create your own path using your own creative tool box in a way that works best for your interests and your questions. And that can be very different from what the rest of your colleagues are doing. I just like that aspect of individual creativity and the role that that plays in asking and answering scientific questions. That's often missing from our understanding of what scientists are and what they do, at those early stages of grade school and high school.”
Even though the procedures are standardized across the ForestGeo Network, have you been able to have creative input?
“Yeah! That's the neat thing about it. The network is so big, the questions are just limitless. For example, when I joined the network about eight years ago, there weren't many scientists in it that were using the network to address comparative questions across temperate and tropical ecosystems. Most of the studies were either tropical or temperate. That's what attracted me to the network to begin with, thinking, 'Wow, we could ask these global scale questions across different types of forests worldwide.'“
“So that was a real opportunity to then design some studies that focused on questions comparing biodiversity patterns and processes across different forests at the global scale. It was surprising for me. That comparative potential is what attracted me to the network, but there wasn't much work like that being done. So our lab has contributed to those global scale studies in recent years.”