We asked project lead Chris Peter about his experiences with collaborative science, why he values it, how he got his start in it, and more. Below, Chris discusses the National Marsh Synthesis Team project, how collaboration shapes his approach to research, and how collaborative science helps position managers to make informed and strategic decisions.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Why do you use collaborative science?
It's helpful to get out of that echo chamber of opinions, whether it's working with other researchers, or managers, or even the general public, aquaculturists – just to get perspectives that you don't get from inside your bubble. Collaborative science makes it so that research doesn’t happen within your own bubble. You get more information and resources to work with and sometimes that can feel like a lot, because then you can potentially work on everything you uncover, but it just helps to have a broader perspective.
“I think science is just an awesome iterative process, and to bring collaboration into that, just enhances it, right?”
So at the beginning stage, when we ask ourselves, what do we work on? Is this the right research question? Is this the right process? Do we have the right people? Are these the right products? Is this the best format? We get a lot of external feedback throughout that iterative science process, through the power of people and perspectives; I feel that's very powerful.
How has collaborative science positioned your reserve and community partners to take action on shared goals?
I think it helps that our reserve is very used to working with people; it always helps when you've had the experience of working across agencies, across researchers. You have the tools, you have the skill sets, you have the temperament, you have the patience to do that, and you also build the networks to do that. We have a great community of scientists in the region. We've been working with them on collaborative research projects for over a decade and so a lot of this is not new to them anymore. We can hit the ground running. For some people, it’s still a little bit new, but they seem to pick it up pretty quickly.
At our reserve, we also know not to start and finish with ourselves. We want to envision what the end goal is and think about how to get there and not just say: “hey, I think I see a research need; I'm just gonna go for it and I'm not going to vet it.” With that kind of approach, you'll probably answer a pretty interesting question, but maybe it's not the question that's of highest priority to your community, whether it's your research community, your management community, the public, etc.
I used to view a research project as being mostly done through research scientists, or a collection of them. And now, with collaborative research, we've broadened that to research scientists across geography and disciplines. We also added the dimension of “what happens with this science afterwards; does it have value in the management community? Does it have value to municipalities?” We engage those groups of people as well, from the start and throughout a project, to ensure it has impact and value beyond just the bubble of research scientists. Going back to the bubble idea – we try to make that bubble bigger and bigger.
How did you know the National Marsh Synthesis Team (NAMASTE) project was needed?
Monitoring programs often spend a lot of time collecting data, then writing SOPs, and quality controlling it but there's a barrier to analysis. That's common within the NERRS, and outside the NERRS, with marsh data, with water quality data, with fish nekton data. A lot of these monitoring programs are meant to be the backbone that helps launch research and answer management questions; that’s what they're set up to do. In thinking about how we take all these data that we’ve collected and talk about what we do with them, we found barriers to regional analysis and realized that maybe that’s why it hadn’t been done before. The whole idea behind the National Marsh Synthesis Team (NAMASTE) project was to go a step further, and start answering questions, start applying the data. We also wanted to take steps to break those barriers down, steps such as developing tools and training to support analysis.
As we began to imagine NAMASTE, we were able to take the findings, the impacts, and the future next steps from two prior catalyst projects, and really bring them together to determine the natural next step. We did that within our two different groups – the SETr group and then the regional synthesis group – and we found the area of overlap. What emerged was a System-wide need. We were able to leverage the teams that had been part of the prior projects to take the next step. Bringing those two teams together was a good, grounded way to understand what the System's needs were, because they've already done the work.
How did you come to be involved in collaborative science?
I’m one of the more introvert-y of introverted scientists out there. Coming into a leadership role at Great Bay, and one that focuses on collaborative science, that serves coastal management needs – those are all very different shifts in how I viewed research, and different ways of applying the research and doing it. Previously I was mostly in a small research circle, without connections to a group of non-scientists giving feedback, or getting different, diverse perspectives, or having that iteration along the way. So that was all different and all new to me.
And now, I think you have many clips of me saying it, but I'm a big fan of it, and I apply it, you know, maybe not universally, but ubiquitously. Most of our research is applying these tools that I've learned from your training and workshops and a lot of the projects we've been on, so I feel like in that sense I am kind of reborn a little bit in the collaborative science image.
It is contagious, and inspiring, and maybe motivating, and it's like, why are you doing the work if you're not going to disseminate it, right? If people aren't going to learn from it, it doesn't have an impact.
I keep on hearing “oh, I didn't do any collaborative science whatsoever.” I think we've all done it, we just never really put that label on it, we never really put the structure on it as much. But we all go to conferences, and we kind of get a finger on the pulse of some of the latest research trends. So we're reading manuscripts, we're connecting with the outside world, but I think we're just doing it a lot more intentionally, and structured and targeted within a project.
What changes have you seen as a result of the project?
There's definitely some direct and ripple impacts of this project in terms of how we collect the data and, of course, how we analyze it. I think one of them is better understanding of where your marsh is in the context of other trends. So if I have a marsh in North Carolina, how does it compare to other marshes in the Mid-Atlantic or the Southeast? How does it compare to marshes on the West Coast? We were able to give context around marsh changes over time, which I don't think anyone had really done at the national level with applied, consistent, field-based methodologies – so that is novel and new. There's now kind of an interesting impetus for other coastal vegetative habitats to either release, for the first time, or revise their existing protocols.
“I think another big product out of the NAMASTE project is this really solid way of vetting our standard operating procedure, our methods of collecting data.”
I think that had probably been done elsewhere a little bit, but we did it in a very vigorous and comprehensive way, so we were able to then provide many recommendations on enhancing the living SOP, and come up with an updated version.
At the national level, things become quite complicated when you try to bring data together and make sense of them. You have different species and different bioregions, you have different forcing factors. Sometimes you have tidal ranges of inches, sometimes you have tidal ranges of 15 feet. We tried to come up with ways to resolve or unify those differences, and we came up with a new metric called the Ecotone Migration Index, which tries to smooth that out across regions, across species, across different zones, and responses of plants in marshes around the country.
Why do those changes matter?
If you know all these things and have all this context, it might give you a reason to sink some more regional resources into something. If you’re a manager you might say “What I thought was changing in my marsh in New Hampshire is pretty much similar to what's going on in Massachusetts, but that's fine.” However, when you consider that in the context of what is happening with marshes at the national level, maybe you realize that's not fine. It gives you that increased clarity, ability to have more urgency, to get more funding, to do more restoration, or do more land protection to help maintain that marsh in future. It’s really trying to help managers be more informed and strategic at scales that they probably don't think about as much.