| Hi everyone, Just came back from a long trip to Galilee, showing a visitor from the US National Parks Service around one of our own "parks", the Hula Valley Nature Reserve. He wanted to see birds, and it's a good place for that: It was quite a week. This guy, Dr. John Gross, is a specialist in Inventory and Monitoring at NPS, and came to do a workshop with us on the subject. I participated since data management is core to this kind of work. He gave a daylong series of lectures which I found rather emotional (!!) because every problem and worry and mistake I've made has also been made by the NPS at a much larger scale and for much more money. Talk about sharing experience, strength and hope. I was exhausted listening because I was filing every bit away, 16 pages of notes, directly relevant to my work. Here, I've been working on data management for thirteen years, pretty much alone and not seeing my way forward very clearly. In addition it is only recently that my organization began to see data as a tool for management; before then, most saw this as a kind of archive secondary to their own records on their own computers, and therefore pretty useless. I've seen my budget slashed and resurrected twice (forcing closure of my work for half a year in one case); been threatened with being fired or transferred because what I do is not useful. And recently the consensus is that the data network is central and crucial. That kind of flip-flopping around is hard on the system. The National Park Service went through all this about ten years ago, moving all their scientists to Fish & Wildlife, an the USGS, and then rather shamefacedly needing to replace them for inventory and monitoring.....and they went through a recent attitude change which bodes well for us as well. The curious thing is that I knew this guy as a graduate student when I was a research ecologist down in the Negev. Haven't seen him for 15 years, but we reconnected as if those years didn't pass. He's a very energetic, friendly guy which made that easier.... Well, quite a few people who work with me just had a big-time wakeup call on data management and are digesting it. I'll see how that plays out, but it sure was positive reinforcement for my work. One thing that came out of all this was that six of us who work on data management of some kind, across foresty, conservation, and academia agreed to come together in a working group on informatics. We have different strengths, and may have more strength in numbers, agreeing on common protocols. That happened fast and easy. We will see how that goes. So many positive developments in one week, when I'm accustomed to a shit/progress ratio of about 9/1, is hard on my system. I have to rest this weekend, because I'm going down to the Negev to lecture next week and have a manuscript to revise for publication. It's all good stuff, and I'm not sure I can handle it. shabbat shalom, Linda |
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