Decades of Visiting a Greenland Field Site with Children

In this recent blog post, Pernille Sporon Boving shares an interview with her 3 children about their thoughts on climate change and climate change actions.  Interspersed among the Q&A are photos of the children from their Greenland field site over the last 2 decades.  We hope to have Eric, Pernille, and the three children write a post about their experience as a family in the field.

https://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/what-can-i-do/youth-climate-views-keep-calm-and-vote-on/

Geography Fieldwork With Family

"Fieldwork...With Family", published by The Geographical Review in 2001, is a lovely and poetic look at the ways doing fieldwork with a family can influence your experience.   The authors include Paul F. Starrs (Distinguished Professor geography), Lynn Huntsinger (Professor of Rangeland Ecology and Management), and their two daughters (Carlin and Genoa) - all contributing their own perspective to this tale.  This includes a detailed discussion of the logistics of extended international travel with a family, as well as having older children as field assistants.  

Some of my favorite quotes include:

"Let me also be honest and say that, at least for my family and others I know, working in the field together is excitement, a spice to life, the best form of wild ride." "Research was not as I had known it-not worse, but different." "Some of the Indiana Jonesish aspects of fieldwork do get shoved on the shelf when you are accompanied; but for those you can always go back alone, or break off for a stretch."

Professor Starrs was kind enough to share an update about his daughters, they are now 27 and nearly 29.  They're still stalwart fieldworkers, one in Kauai, Hawaii, and the other currently staff at UC Berkeley.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2001.tb00460.x

International, Tropical, Treetop, Single Parenting

Meg Lowman is an american-born international biologist and ecologist, with expertise in tropical rainforest canopy ecology, canopy plant-insect relationships, and constructing canopy walkways.  She is also an educator, author, editor, adventurer, public speaker, AND single mother of two boys who she brought with her in the field.  Those two boys have since both graduated from Princeton in the sciences.

This is a great article, talking about her accomplishments and how she managed this - http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2006/09/case-study-mom-scientist-canopy-meg

Here is an excerpt from the article "...Lowman's most important innovation was this: she turned longer field expeditions into family trips, taking her two sons to remote regions of four continents. "We have shared adventures in the Amazon, dangling from trees together, walking on canopy bridges, learning medicinal plants from a shaman, eating insects, spotting scarlet macaws, and just getting muddy," she writes in It’s a Jungle Up There. "Experiencing the world through three pairs of eyes has enriched my life far beyond relying on my own view alone."  The article itself talks about more of the logistics.

I have had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Lowman speak twice, and read her first book, "Life in the Treetops".  I found the stories shared very inspirational, and I often reflect on them as I am trying to navigate research and parenthood myself.  I highly recommend the book, and It's a Jungle Up There, written in collaboration with her sons, is next on my list.

Dr. Lowman is currently the Director of Global Initiatives, Lindsay Chair of Botany, & Senior Scientist in Plant Conservation at the California Academy of Sciences.  In 2014, she joined this organization as the Chief of Science and Sustainability, and was responsible for the programs of scientific research and exploration.  She was previously a Professor at North Carolina State University and the founding director of North Carolina’s Nature Research Center at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.  Her list of nicknames is almost as impressive as the list of honors, including “Mother of Canopy Research”, “Canopy Meg”, “real-life Lorax”, and the “Einstein of the treetops”.