We are officially in the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021 – 2030), which is global movement to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems. Whichever way you look at ecosystem restoration, chances are that you will eventually encounter trees, and by extension forests. Here in Sweden, forests have been in the national discourse ...

Biodiversity is a complex term but it essentially encompasses life in all its variety, ranging from individual genes to entire ecosystems. The legendary biologist Edward O. Wilson defines biodiversity as “the totality of all inherited variation in the life forms of Earth”. The loss of biodiversity due to human activities and its negative effect on ...

Column by Claire Lyons and Katharina Herzog, members of the National Junior Faculty in Sweden, about that the science community need to adopt a more positive view on ‘negative’ results.

As most of us know, our planet is changing on several fronts such as climate change, polluted oceans, biodiversity declines, land degradation, and so on. But Earth is a big place and keeping tabs on these changes is a huge task. There is currently one tool at our disposal that can provide us with the ...

Imagine this – you go to your local park in Europe (or North America) and you take pictures of, and with, random children. Then, without the child’s or their guardian’s consent, you post those picture online for the world to see with captions like “these kids stole my heart [heart emoji]”. This would be unacceptable, ...

Should scientists be concerned if their research output is inaccessible to non-experts? Put another way, should scientists make an effort to communicate their science to the wider public? I posed these questions to a group of graduate students and postdocs and the feedback was mixed. On the one hand, there were legitimate concerns about the ...

Running an independent project is different from writing the proposal for it. I know it seems obvious but for a person who is running their project for the first time, this does not become obvious until the work begins. Once a project is funded, the postdoc is effectively a principal investigator and is on the ...

Communicating science to the public can be a balancing act, especially for academics who are used to speak about their science to peers that share a considerable amount of background knowledge. Many scientists believe that they need to ‘dumb down’ their research in order to make their audience understand it and fear that it will ...