A Brief Update and Overview of the New Science Blog #FireEcology #RxFire

The "New Science Blog" exists to increase the rate at which relevant science is shared with practitioners and researchers in the Upper Midwest.

Curating the blog:

The blog is curated to meet our major goal of sharing applied science with practitioners.

Papers shared via the blog are selected for their potential relevance to fire practitioners, land managers, ecologists, researchers, and policy makers in the region.

Your feedback about whether we were too narrow or too broad with our first selections will help us modify how we determine which papers to share.

How we find new publications:

The primary way we find new publications is through Google Scholar. Google Scholar alerts notify us when new fire science publications have been published for the tallgrass prairie and oak savanna ecosystems; for example, Google Scholar alerts notify us of papers that include both the phrase "tallgrass prairie" and "fire."

You can easily create your own advanced searches and get updates in your inbox using the "Create alert" icon at the bottom of the left-hand menu on Google Scholar (scholar.google.com).

Other common ways we hear about new publications are through pre-publication presentations at conferences, updates on Twitter, and directly from authors.

The types of publications we tend to share:

Readers can expect to see an emphasis on papers that compare restoration and management techniques that incorporate prescribed fire (for example, research published in Restoration Ecology, Ecological Restoration, Fire Ecology, Conservation Biology, Ecosphere). Studies of fire effects on taxa and other natural history papers also provide valuable information to land stewards and wildlife biologists (journals such as American Midland Naturalist [RIP], Natural Areas Journal, and Biodiversity Conservation).

We will also share papers that provide examples of fire ecology research methods that can be applied to management challenges in the TPOS region even if the study was not conducted here.

Some or our readers have interest in papers that share interesting perspectives on fire ecology, wildfire, and prescribed fire, whether or not the information can be directly applied. You can expect to see about 5-10 percent of posts here sharing new peer-reviewed papers that address national policy, issues that affect public opinion about prescribed fire (like smoke), and fire science that is otherwise nationally or internationally notable.

There are multiple options to follow the New Science Blog:

There are a couple of ways to access the New Science Blog.

The blog is linked to the "Just New Papers" Twitter account (@strictlyfiresci), which posts automatically as this blog is updated. [If you're reading this, chances are you came here via Twitter.]

As information technology scholars have long noted, one weakness of Twitter is that  "not every user may have something worthwhile to tweet" (Information Systems: A Manager’s Guide to Harnessing Technology, 2010). While the future of Twitter has become more precarious at approximately the same time this blog has been ramping up, there are other ways recieve updates from the New Science blog.

An alternative way is to subscribe via RSS, a tool familiar to Gen X and Elder Millennials. Believe it or not, there are still some ways to do this, but it's now a niche technology. IYKYK - http://www.tposfirescience.org/new-science/rss.xml

The third way, and the simplest for those who aren't interested in Twitter, is to watch for research round ups in the TPOS newsletter (join here).

References

"Twitter and the Rise of Microblogging," in Information Systems: A Manager’s Guide to Harnessing Technology, 2011, https://open.lib.umn.edu/informationsystems/chapter/7-5-twitter-and-the-rise-of-microblogging/. Accessed Nov. 8, 2022.