Jonanthan Myers
Associate Professor of Biology
“One thing that’s a bit unique for field biologists is that a lot of our research is concentrated over the summer field season. Research operations at the university have been altered, COVID-19 can have a disproportionately negative effect on the research programs of field biologists, and field ecologists in particular. That impact can be especially large when you have a long-term research project.
Our summer field team was going to include eleven people and right now we’re down to two. So we stepped back and looked at all of our goals for the field season and said, ‘Okay, if we can only do one or two things this season, what’s the highest priority?’ We ended up deciding to maintain two of our long-term projects at Tyson.”
Has your participation in the Smithsonian Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO) given you unique perspective on how COVID-19 is affecting scientists all over the world?
“It was clear from the beginning that—at least within the U.S., where a lot of the forest plots are based at universities and university field stations—everyone was experiencing the same sort of negative impacts on their research program. I’ve heard that a lot of my colleagues that conduct research out of the country have just canceled their field seasons altogether this year, which means no data coming in for 2020. Everyone’s kind of in the same boat. And I think that’s going to have a disproportionately negative effect on researchers beginning their careers and graduate students in particular.
On the bright side, there are a large number of scientists in the network that already have data. Given limitations on field research at this time, we can use this free time to work on data analyses and manuscripts. Right now I’m collaborating on at least three different global-scale studies that are combining data sets across the ForestGEO network.”
You mentioned how you and Erin are the only people working on your research projects now. Isn’t that an incredible amount of work for two people?
“Yes, we’ve been pretty busy. I’m juggling many different projects at any given time. But it’s actually a good thing for me because I like doing a variety of things every week. Last week, going into the field for the first time was great. It was liberating—it felt so good to get off the computer. But the mentally challenging aspect of it is making sure that we’re staying positive about the progress we’re making, even though it’s slow-going relative to the progress we would be making if we had our full team.”