Over the next 8 weeks, my research team (Ethan Hobbs, Philip Benson, and I) will be delving into the details of the global pollinator decline. We are starting with almost no knowledge of this problem and within 2 months, we will have to offer up our own solution to the Grand Challenge, "reduce the rate of pollinator decline by 50% by the 2025". As we move through this project, I aim to provide an update each week on our progress. I am hoping that by providing some details about the process of scientific research, that you will have a better sense for how scientists arrive at the decisions they make (this part is often the only visible part). This is also a new process for me because it is my first opportunity to do policy-style science. What I mean by this is that we will not be engaging in lab-bench science to answer the Grand Challenge question. Instead, we will be relying on the decades of work done by many other scientists, collating that information, synthesizing it into the context of our Grand Challenge, and then providing a "solution". Last, week we were given our problem and we all met with our advisor (Dr. Colin Campbell) to discuss the approach. After the first month, we will be presenting to the others about the problem ONLY. "The problem" includes all the technical details about the threats pollinators face AND the context of the problem like the global significance or the social and economic impacts. Once our advisor focused our energy on discovering what the PROBLEM was about, we went into the IQ office and drew on the board. We outlined all the things that we would like to know about pollinators including their global distribution, the rate of decline per type of pollinator, the human impacts of pollinator decline, and much more. In my mind, there are two really good starting points for learning about something you know nothing about. The first, is to find a local expert who thinks about the topic a lot. For us, this is Tom Theobald, who is the founder of the Boulder County Beekeepers' Association. He has a fantastic blog that you can find here. Tom is a local advocate for pollinator health and potentially a great source of local knowledge on this topic.
The second approach, is to start at the global scale. I was encouraged by my professor Nichole Barger to take a look at the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services' (IPBES) Assessment Report on Pollinators, Pollination, and Food Production (link here). This is a United Nation's report that policy-makers would consult before making decisions about agriculture, pesticide use, and pollinators. Now that we have some background knowledge of the topic, we will meet with our advisor tomorrow to outline which research areas we need to delve into in more depth to actually address the Grand Challenge question. I suppose we may also reach out to local resources, like Tom Theobald, for some in-person meetings and discussion
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AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
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