We asked project lead Ashley Smyth about her pathway to practicing collaborative science and how collaborative science played a role in supporting the Guana Nutrients project. Below, she shares more about her approach, as well as some advice she received early in her career that helped shape her mindset for engaging others in collaborative science projects.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
Why do you use collaborative science in your work?
I use collaborative science in my work because there's nothing more rewarding to me than being able to work with people who are on the ground seeing things happen – living it, feeling it, having these shared experiences – and then being able to ask collectively, why? What's happening?
So much of what I have to do in my job is be in the literature, be in the lab. I often will miss that local need, or the community needs, so collaborative science gives me the chance to work with the relevant parties to craft research that's both giving answers to questions that they come up with but also helping me become a better scientist and answer some more fundamental questions that also spark my interest.
I've seen other funders come to it lately too but some have so many requirements – they're not making it as easy as it is for us now. And we're kind of a secret – nobody knows about the NERRS, and we are doing this groundbreaking, innovative stuff.
How did you get into collaborative science?
I think I've been doing collaborative science for a really long time, I just didn't know it was collaborative science. I didn't realize that the interaction, and the feedback, and taking what you're hearing from the community and building science around it, and doing science together was collaborative science – that was always something I did, and it wasn't until our NERRS Science Collaborative project that I realized that that's a whole systems-level of thinking about how to do science.
If I have to think back about when I started to do collaborative science, it was as a postdoc at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. I had just gotten this David H. Smith Conservation Research Postdoctoral Fellowship and the idea of that fellowship is that every fellow has an academic partner and a practitioner partner, so the proposal's crafted in collaboration and the mentorship of that fellow is done in collaboration. It was during that time as a postdoc fellow I got to work with Virginia Sea Grant, and I have this very vivid memory of going out to the field and thinking that every shellfish aquaculture farmer was just going to want to work with me.
“I was this overly ambitious, fresh-out-of-grad-school scientist saying, “I can come sample your lease! I can take sediment samples, I can measure all these great things!”
Nobody returned my calls. People thought that I worked for the state and that I was going to find Vibrio [bacteria that occur naturally in our coastal waters] and try to shut them down!
I remember going to Karen Hudson, my practitioner mentor, and asking, “what am I doing wrong? What's happening?” And she said, “it's your whole approach. You are coming at this like an academic, and you need to meet people in their space, and listen to them, hear from them, and craft what you need to also address what they need and your needs.”
So she and I redid my whole pitch, we made some handouts and went on some site visits. I ended up getting six farmers who wanted to work with me. By the end of my fellowship, I had farmers from around the state sending me samples to analyze. It was a little overwhelming but it was great and I think that's when I realized that, to really have a meaningful impact, I have to be thinking not just about my needs but the needs of the group collectively, and be willing to listen and hear and share stories and learn from each other.
How has collaborative science positioned you and community partners to take action to address shared goals?
Number one, collaborative science gives you time. When you say you're doing something as collaborative science, it gives you the time to be intentional about building relationships, and that is really the key.
“Cultivating those relationships and those connections, and listening and working together, ultimately gets you to have these impacts that everyone can benefit from.”
To put that in context, one of the outputs from our project was this list of recommendations that we gave back to the community about restoring water quality in the Guana Estuary – those recommendations were not created in a vacuum. We had multiple meetings throughout the project with all these potential stakeholders to make sure that we distilled all the science we’d been doing into recommendations that were relevant and something that they could use. For example, in one of the meetings we had, we proposed an idea that would have conflicted with ongoing mosquito control activities. The mosquito control representative in our network brought that to our attention, and we removed the recommendation; I think that action showed the trust that we had in them and what they were telling us, and also allowed them to gain trust in us. And because of that trust-building, now we have these recommendations that are really actionable and can help restore water quality in the estuary.
Why did you do the project, and how did you know it was needed?
When the call for proposals came out, Christine Angelini and I looked at the management recommendations and we reached out to Nikki Dix at the GTM NERR to discuss what she was looking for in those management needs and where those came from. Ideas from those conversations fed into the pre-proposal.
After we were encouraged to submit a full proposal, we went to the larger stakeholder network, and we had conversations with them to figure out what they wanted, what their interests were, and what their needs were. There were a lot of perspectives represented in this network; we have a whole chart where you can see what everyone’s organization was, what their needs were, what outputs they were interested in from the project. We used that to create the full proposal, making sure that everything that we were doing would lead back to something that one of our stakeholders identified as a clear product or information nugget that they needed.
What changes have you seen as a result of the project, and why does that matter?
We had a network of relevant parties and scientists, managers from the whole watershed – covering a large range of individuals' personalities, needs, wants, and desires. So, on a personal level, I learned how to manage that kind of large project, and also to have these discussions and to get comfortable being uncomfortable.
It's kind of the same thing with my aquaculture industry connections. I don't need to be the expert in everything, and I can come listen and learn and have these conversations and yeah, sure, people are going to look to you because you have a PhD, and maybe you do know a little bit more about nitrogen cycling than most people, but putting away that front and being more of an authentic person– that’s one of the things that came up in some of our discussions when we were telling our network “we don't know, we don't have the answer,” or “this didn't work.” That sort of authentic self really helped to create trust and a mutual understanding and respect.
We also have graduate students who've graduated, and papers that are coming out, so we have all those impacts, too. But bigger picture, there's been a chance for spin-off projects based on these recommendations, and there are other scientists who are having more conversations and tackling those now. Those conversations, to me, are the impact continuing on from our project and showing that people were learning from our project. I can't tell you that our project saved the Guana but I like to think that it will one day at least help get the water quality back to meeting standards.
One other key impact, for me, from our project came from a member of our stakeholder network at our final project meeting. I remember him telling me that he didn't know how his management decision affects the water quality until our project. If I can create that in his brain and his mind – and he now knows that, and he's more intentional about the way that he manages the water – to me, that means that we've done something right.
What was the role of collaborative science in making changes that you observed possible?
Collaborative Science made these impacts possible because of the intentionality of listening to all the relevant parties, and having the time to have those conversations. I think being able to work collectively together throughout the process, and being encouraged to do that, is really how collaborative science led to having some of these impacts that we've been able to get.
“The mantra of our lab group is that “science isn't complete until it's put into practice.”
I think that’s because my ultimate goal is always to make science accessible – to hope that people use it, to have it really be transformative, to lead to some knowledge gain, behavior change – and ultimately have some impact on our ecosystems. I can sit in my office all the time and write great papers but, if no one's reading that, and it's not relevant to the people who actually can enact change, then what am I doing? I want to do impactful work– I have this desire to put my science into practice and I think a lot about being collaborative and intentional about those conversations, and going to people to see what they need and where I can support them. Part of that is making it so that we do these things together and that they're really part of the process, and not just an afterthought.
So collaborative science is really the key for me to really tackle these complex problems so that it’s not just me and my lab working on them. They really do require diverse opinions to come up with diverse solutions, and that means you have to have difficult conversations, learn about everyone's wants, desires, and needs.