Talk:Carol A. Johnston

External Review

Hi - My name is Jolie, and I'm the Project Coordinator for the WikiProject Limnology & Oceanography team. The external reviewer for the page on Dr. Carol A. Johnston doesn't have a Wikipedia account, so I'm posting the review below on their behalf. If you have any questions about your review, or would like to clarify anything, please feel free to post your questions to my talk page so I can pass them along to your reviewer. Thanks, and all the best as you wrap up your Wikipedia editing assignment!

EXTERNAL REVIEW

Introduction from reviewer:

I am an Assistant Researcher at the University of California Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory, in the 2nd year of my position in a professional researcher career track. In 2015, I received my PhD (at UC Santa Barbara), and received my BS in 2002 (at University of Vermont). I pursued seasonal field biology positions for many years in between these two programs.

Currently, I primarily study endangered frogs (the mountain yellow-legged frogs, Rana sierrae and R. muscosa), which live in remote high elevation lakes in places like Yosemite National Park. Our studies of these frogs focus on the causes and consequences of their declines, which are largely driven by infectious disease. My team also studies how to reverse these declines, and we cooperate with Yosemite National Park, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and two zoos (San Francisco and Oakland). We often help release zoo-raised frogs back into the wild to reestablish populations at sites where frogs had been locally extinct.

I am a community ecologist and I work in freshwater systems, and my interests revolve around how species interactions shape communities. These interactions include disease-host, predator-prey, competitive, and indirect interactions. For example, my postdoctoral work focused on how predators (gartersnakes) challenge restoration of frog populations, and my dissertation focused on how the loss of frogs from Sierra Nevada lakes influences aquatic insect and algal assemblages. In the course of my research, I have spent over 3,000 days and nights backpacking in the Sierra Nevada.

Overall comments:

This is an excellent new contribution to Wikipedia, and does a good job representing a scientist who has made substantial contributions to the science of ecology, and has worked to communicate that science to policymakers. Although there seems to be variability in the format and content for scientist pages (ecologists, at least) throughout Wikipedia, in my review I tried to keep in mind the extent to which this article resembles or differs from a subset that I looked at. However, due to this variability, my suggestions may be debated by another reviewer or contributor.

To the extent that I understand the pillars of Wikipedia and the editing process here, I believe this article meets the guidelines.

The most important revision is to complete the Publications by providing full citations.

I think writing style, punctuation, and grammar meet the Wikipedia standard of being broadly accessible, and they seem largely correct. A few typos or minor mechanical errors should be addressed after a careful proofread.

References:

There seem to be sufficient references and all statements appear supported by references. This article does rely heavily on 3 sources (Dr. Johnston’s faculty webpage, a biography accompanying news of an award, and ResearchGate). I wonder if resources are available (news, media, interviews, etc.) that might contain additional information about Dr. Johnston’s career, especially those things that might not be reflected in the two biographies (e.g. advising, outreach, policy work).

Lead Section:

This section is concise and seems sufficient.

Education:

Provide years of Dr. Johnston’s degrees. For graduate degrees, if thesis/dissertation topics or titles are available, those would be valuable to readers.

Career

Beyond describing the positions, I think this section can benefit from a sentence (or as much as a paragraph) describing Dr. Johnston’s major contributions. This might include a synthesis of the research results. For example, beavers have not always been appreciated, by policy makers or even scientists, for their positive roles in ecosystems; I believe that Dr. Johnston’s work has contributed to that concept. However, there is certainly still controversy surrounding beavers, so elaborating on this topic must be done in accordance with the Wikipedia goal of ‘due weight’ in representing all sides of a conflict.

In line with that focusing on the themes of Dr. Johnston’s career, I suggest moving the sentence “She has identified her research interests as…”: to the beginning of the career section. Because this sentence applies to Dr. Johnston’s whole career, it may serve to introduce the Career section. Appearing in the middle of the paragraph, it is less visible.

To make the career section feel more concrete, provide years for major milestones or positions would make this section feel more concrete, especially for the most notable positions, e.g. the start of the longest held position (SDSU).

“is currently”: this could be changed to the date of the emeritus appointment (‘...since 20XX’); that will make the page more future-proof.

Awards and Honors:

3.1 - Committees and Related Service

This section could be placed in the Career section (see comments above).

3.3 - Notable Grants

The above two sections appear to be unusual among scientist pages. If ‘Notable Grants’ were applicable, it could be informative if specific grants were described, and especially if those grants that might have had long duration, a very large impact, or a somewhat unusual scope. In general, the subjects of the grants probably correlate highly with the publications, so they may not add much information beyond that section.

3.4 - Other Awards and Honors

This section seems consistent with other ecologist pages.

Publications

This is critical to address: Overall, the Publications section should list the publications using a standard and full citation format, including co-authors, year, journal, etc., and DOI should be included. The publications already provided have links to references, which is good. Because the citation information will generally identify the type of publication (research publication, book, etc.), the subheadings can be removed.

The tally of publications and citations does not appear on other scientist pages, and lacks a ranking or comparison to put them into context.I think that unless Dr. Johnston’s awards and distinctions explicitly honor her publication or citation record, this tally may be unnecessary. A link to Google Scholar or other database would be a more useful addition to the external links section.

The short paragraph “Her paper in collaboration with researchers…” may fit better in the Career section.

Comments on other features:

1. External links: an external link to the scientist’s research website, outside of the citations may be helpful, e.g. https://sites.google.com/d.umn.edu/carol-a-johnston/.

2. Infobox: This may be a helpful addition, and is included in bios of several other notable ecologists.

I referred to these Wikipedia pages to see what the typical bio for an ecologist looks like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_ecologists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Eleanor_Power

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meghan_Duffy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Balch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Borer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grimm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Pringle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Turner

JoGDelta (talk) 01:33, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

Suggested edits

Hi -- I'm a PhD student reviewing this article for a wetland science course and wanted to make a few suggested edits.

1) Dr. Johnston's Distinguished Landscape Ecologist Award from the International Association for Landscape Ecology in 2022 should be added to the listed awards.[1][2]

2) The publications should be reorganized, so they're in reverse chronological order (as was done with the awards).

3) Dr. Johnston's most-cited publications should be added to the "Selected publications" section. Specifically, "Biogeochemical hot spots and hot moments at the interface of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem" and "Alteration of North American streams by beaver" have each been cited over 1,000 times according to Google Scholar, but neither are listed.[3]

RuleBreakingMoth (talk) 17:51, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Wetland Science and Management 2023

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 10 January 2023 and 20 April 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): RuleBreakingMoth (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Mdellingersoils (talk) 21:33, 8 March 2023 (UTC)