Chris Feurt, the lead for the Marshes for Maine’s Future project, has served a leadership role in seven Science Collaborative projects since 2010. Below, Chris talks about the value of collaborative science, how people and nature benefit from its use, and how the NERRS has shaped its evolution.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Why do you use collaborative science?
I'm really focused on results and wanting things to happen, wanting things to change, and also wanting people to learn from each other. I always say the ‘aha’ moment – when cultural models and mental models change – is when someone goes “whoa, I never thought of it that way.” And when people think of things in new ways, they're more likely to be innovative and to solve thorny problems or hard challenges because they're getting out of their normal way of thinking. Today's challenges really need people to think in a new way.
Changing people's minds comes, foundationally, from being an educator. An educator isn't thinking, ‘I know, and you don't.’ An educator just wants to wake people's minds up and get people talking so they can learn from each other. That goes so much with collaborative science because it's about getting all the people who are involved in an issue around the table to work on it together.
“The NERRs are leaders in this country when it comes to doing collaborative research.”
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 has collaborative science positioned you or your reserve and community partners to take action on shared goals?
We learn something from each project that helps guide us to the next project. At the end of one project, we'll say, “well, here's what we heard. Let's go this way now.” So in a way, the ideas for a project are coming from the people that were in the previous project.
Right now we're really connected to Wells, which is one of the most vulnerable towns for sea level rise in all of Maine. The relationship between all the sectors at our reserve is really strong because when we do projects, we link it to what the community needs and what the community wants. We're not going to go away. Many times, the grant ends and the people are gone – but we're right here. We're their neighbor. And that's true all over the System; they can count on us being there.
Why did you do the Marshes for Maine’s Future project?
Marshes for Maine’s Future started with the rare occurrence of me actually reading the literature, which I never have time to do. I found a paper called “Marshes are the New Beaches” by Neil Ganju and I had studied marshes for my Master’s, specifically barrier island migration. In this paper, he's making the case for how sediment movement, which is pretty well understood in barrier island migration, is now happening more with marshes, and that we should be looking at the movement of sand over marshes and how they change.
When I started looking into Neil, I found that he’d just finished this project on a geospatial tool that you could use to make decisions about marsh management and conservation. So I cold-called him; the only thing that prompted it was there was a transfer grant opportunity coming up at the time and I thought it would be such a cool transfer grant. Then I wrote an email to the dozen people I knew were working on marshes in Maine and I told them about his work, and of course they’d all heard of him, I just didn’t know it; they all knew Neil from his research.
The intended users were marsh practitioners because we found one of the biggest problems with geospatial data is that the people that design it assume the users know more than they do, and they think people have more time than they do. So the people on the project were the actual people who already knew how to use geospatial data. We weren’t designing something expecting a municipal official to use it – it was for people who already used geospatial data.
We also calculated how much time they would have to spend on the project, which included the four workshops plus time for them to practice, and we spelled it out for them so they knew how much time they would need to commit. When you're trying to sell a project and everybody's busy, if you can put a time limit and then be accountable for reporting back, you're building trust with the community.
What changes have you started to see as a result of the project and why do those matter?
At a high level, one big mindset change is we've got to think about the consequences of what’s happening to the marshes, and then how we can use the data to make changes. If all you're dealing with is the monitoring in a non-collaborative research model, you can study something until it's gone.
“Maybe you’re doing research but collaborative science is about working with others to actually make something happen that you all agree is meaningful.”
That's the other fundamental thing about working with end users– they care about places and they care about generations and they care about their livelihood. So if you want to design your research so that you're caring for places, you're caring for people of future generations, and you're protecting livelihoods – you can't do that unless you understand why people care about the place, how they feel about the heritage of a place, and how their livelihood is connected to it. That's one thing that collaborative science does really well, is it goes beyond just studying the ecosystem; you're also going to study the culture that depends on that ecosystem, and that’s really cool.
One of the concepts for Marshes for Maine's future was the unvegetated to vegetated ratio (UVVR), which is a ratio that looks at a marsh and serves as an indication of how long a marsh will survive under conditions of sea level rise. If you've looked in the marsh and it's mostly unvegetated, it's a marsh that sea level is impacting. I've heard in conference presentations and discussions that other people are applying that basic concept as they're making decisions about marshes.
What was the role of collaborative science in making those changes possible?
“The structure of collaborative science has re-woven a relationship with nature that has kind of disappeared.”
One possible thing that has disrupted our relationship with nature is science itself, because the role of research in science is frequently to tease out a specific question, to have a hypothesis, and then to prove or disprove if your hypothesis is correct or not.
The way collaborative science is different is it includes everyone in the research process. It's not just about looking at the environment in a biophysical way. It forces you to think about that combined system of the human environment and the natural environment and think about what people care about and what they are concerned about.
Is sea level rise going to affect their life? Is a degraded estuary going to affect their ability to catch lobsters? It's knitting together the idea of a scientist solving a problem and people caring about things because it's their livelihood, or it's the place where they live, where their children are going to grow up and what the future is going to be.
In a way, collaborative science, to me, is like the science of the future, because it doesn't separate humans from scientists studying the natural environment. It's about places that people care about. It's about jobs that people have that depend on the environment – and basic things as well about drinking clean water, breathing clean air, and people seeing a problem and having a goal to fix it but knowing that they don't have to have the only source of knowledge. We can't solve these complex things we're doing today without it. We call it collaborative science, but it's really kind of old fashioned. It's the way people used to solve problems, where a community would put their knowledge together to protect the environment for the future. I think of it that way.