Member-Voices

SORTEE member voices – Ellen Bledsoe

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Ellen Bledsoe.
 

Date: 06 July 2021.
 

Position: Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow.
 

Research and/or work interests: Community ecology, long-term community dynamics, data science, open science, DEI in STEM.
 

How did you become interested in open research?
I ended up in a wonderful PhD lab that is very strongly committed to Open Science. Before joining, I had honestly not spent much time thinking about the subject, and this aspect of the lab had little impact on my decision to join. I’m so glad, however, that I ended up in a group that helped me learn the importance of openness, reproducibility, and transparency in science!    

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SORTEE member voices – Maxime Fraser Franco

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Maxime Fraser Franco.
 

Date: 06 July 2021.
 

Position: PhD Student.
 

Research and/or work interests: My main research interest is on predator-prey interactions. I focus on studying the ecological and proximal mechanisms that shape the coexistence of foraging specialists and generalists within predator populations. More precisely, I evaluate how individual differences in predator foraging specialization defines individual differences in the type of prey they capture. These dynamics can be shaped by prey behaviour, habitat structure, and predator experience.
 
  Testing ecological hypotheses of individual behavioural variation in wild populations of free-ranging predators can impose considerable ethical, logistical, and financial challenges. Thus, to circumvent some of these difficulties, a part of my work is done using online multiplayer video games as my study system. Virtual worlds contain structured environments where complex trophic and social interactions occur. Some video game types, such as asymmetrical multiplayer horror games, can realistically reproduce a predator-prey interaction within multiple types of habitats. For instance, in these games, players vary in the strategies they use to succeed, while managing navigation and interactions within the virtual environment. Thus, although video games come with their own biases (as any study system) and are a simplified representation of reality, I believe they can provide valuable ecological insight for ecologists.    

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SORTEE member voices – Esteban Fernandez-Juricic

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Esteban Fernandez-Juricic.
 

Date: 06 July 2021.
 

Position: Professor of Biological Sciences.
 

Research and/or work interests: visual ecology, animal behavior, conservation ecology.
 

If you had the power to change one thing about current research practices in your field, what would it be?
Editorial decisions should be based on the robustness of the experimental design and quality of data instead of the type of result (positive, negative)?    

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SORTEE member voices – Matt Grainger

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Matt Grainger.
 

Date: 05 July 2021.
 

Position: Researcher.
 

Research and/or work interests: I am an applied ecologist interested in how we use knowledge to better inform decision making in species conservation. I have a strong interest in developing tools that help people gather information in robust and transparent ways, interact with that information and make inference from it. I currently work on several projects that are fundamentally about how we make open research approaches (i.e. sharing data, sharing code, sharing best practice) as an integrated part of the workflow for biodiversity researchers and how we can take this open research and use it to help decision-makers find optimal solutions..
 

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SORTEE member voices – Patrice Pottier

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Patrice Pottier.
 

Date: 05 July 2021.
 

Position: PhD Candidate.
 

Research and/or work interests: My research mostly revolves around understanding the variation in animals’ responses to anthropogenic stressors. I am also interested in animal behaviour, life history and evolution more broadly and I try to make science more open and reproducible..
 

What ‘ORT’ practice have you introduced into your research practice that you’ve found really helpful?
I recently decided to preregister the majority of my research projects. Although it seemed intimidating at first, I found preregistration to be a useful step to critically assess the relevance of my research projects. It made me rethink my hypotheses and predictions and made sure my experimental design was suitable to answer my original questions. The analysis and writing part was also very straightforward as I just had to follow my plans!    

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SORTEE member voices – Hannah Fraser

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Hannah Fraser.
 

Date: 04 July 2021.
 

Position: Postdoctoral Researcher.
 

Research and/or work interests: Ecology metascience. Bringing metascience insights from other disciplines to ecology.
 

If you had the power to change one thing about current research practices in your field, what would it be?
If I could change one thing about current research practices I would like to see the incentive to publish research quickly removed so that people could conduct more careful, nuanced research.    

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