Future Ecology

Support website for the open-format session “Designing a collective prototype of future tropical and subtropical science”, to take place at the ATBC Annual Meeting 2021.

Designing a collective prototype of future tropical and subtropical science

A scientist surrounded by many plants and animals, with a pair of binocles and light coloured clothes, wearing futuristic sneakers and standing on a hoverboard. On their left side, a hologram of an Ewok, which is their virtual assistant. The future tropical scientist in the field! Amazing artwork by Tanya Strydom.

The world is constantly changing, but the way we do science is not. While there’s space for reimagining our future, there’s space for transformation. We must take a time now to think about the future we want to have.

Being a scientist from a tropical or subtropical country is a unique experience, with its own challenges and opportunities, but it is often normalized that a successful scientific career can not be pursued in our home countries. As a hyper-diverse region, it is important to acknowledge the equally diverse stories behind each scientist so we can understand the history and redesign the future of an inclusive global science.

This session aims at promoting a collaborative speculation experiment to prototype the future of the next generation of tropical scientists. To do that we will combine stories from the past, provided by you in one of our surveys, and participants’ creativity to reflect on, and redesign your stories during our ATBC session.

Together, we will assess the diversity of challenges and opportunities frequently hidden in tropical science, while envisioning a strategy to diminish the challenges and potentialize the opportunities. We will also collectively transform these stories about the future into guidelines, and identify what can be done from now on to rewrite the next generation’s story in our home countries.

Keep an eye on this website as we will add the resulting products of this session here around August 2021!

Help us reimagine the future!

We invite you to help us in this task by answering our survey. It can take as short as three minutes, or as long as you feel like! Please consider sharing your story with us if you:

If you need inspiration, take a look at your hosts’ stories in their native languages!

You can answer the survey in English, French, Portuguese or Spanish!

Please chose the link correspondent to the language you want to use in your answers:

Join uuuussszzzz!!!

Let’s discuss how the future will look like!

The session will last one hour and will have basically a three-step structure:

More information about the session can be found here. If you are interested, go to the ATBC Meeting webpage to register!

Corrections

If you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.

Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. Source code is available at https://github.com/graciellehigino/future.ecology, unless otherwise noted. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".