I did marine biology field work almost 5 decades ago as a lowly junior lab tech. Work always has downsides, for me it was not really the Scots winter, cold feed, chapped hands, the land-rover having to reverse up steep icy roads to get back from the harbourside: it was washing the glassware and dealing with sodium hydroxide weighing (it absorbs moisture from the air so its a fools game). But, field work also brought amazing experiences, I visited the seaside 70+ times over a year, and got an insight into what a time series really means when you cover the tidal and weather and seasonal cycles.
It's also always error-prone. Nothing in the field is perfect. Reality is a bad approximation for your model at times, if you take a model centric view.
I would be immensely skeptical that field work is ever going away. There may be aspects of truth in this around cost of travel, risk, seniority.
I've always enjoyed field work, much of the code I've written has been well outside of any office.
Exploration geophysics paid for me to travel to and across more than half he countries on the planet, calibrating old maps, datums, projections against the 'new' WGS84, scaling peaks to stage base stations, getting familiar with the ins and outs of tides, magnetic fields, gravity, radiometric backgrounds, finding a good band in Mali ...
Douglas Mawson ("home of the blizzard") had a rich life after Antartica as a field geologist, exploring the flinders ranges. He found a radium mine and was shipping ore to Europe for a while. He led students on field trips, one of whom, Reg Sprigg caught the bug, explored as much as he could, persuaded the Australian petro and uranium sector to fund pushing tracks into his favourite spots, and then converted the landscape into the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary. I got to spend a night there last year on a flight safari to Lake Eyre, it's an amazing place, dark sky with a big telescope, wildlife, well worth a visit.
Mawson had the field trip of a lifetime (for his two mates, it was the end of their lifetime!) and it didn't end his bug for the outside. I don't think he was made to sit in a lab.
I'd say your Mali trip was the same: it hasn't made you want to stop being outside from the sound of it.
I've "retired" to argriculture tech and labour support for W.Australian family grain production. We've almost finished harvest and I've been doing a lot of scrolling and posting here while hanging about near idle "on call" fire tenders (we had a hundred fires, mostly from lightening strikes, in a single week just recently)
The Mali trip was notable for random types firing weapons at our aircraft while we were running lines with 80m ground clearance - we had to armour the cockpit bellies and stuff the fuel tanks with mesh.
> The Mali trip was notable for random types firing weapons at our aircraft while we were running lines with 80m ground clearance - we had to armour the cockpit bellies and stuff the fuel tanks with mesh.
Datums can get dull fast but there's adventure inherent in surveying. You should write a book, or at least a chapter or two. "Nadir Point" has a nice ring to it...
There was always something happening, whether it was shipboard fires in the disputed parts of South China Sea or India / Pakistan engaging in cross border nuclear tests in our survey zone.
That last one followed several of us about for years, anytime we crossed a US controlled border they got interested in how we knew what they didn't ...
.. look, we just happened to be there with a 42 litre doped Sodium Iodide crystal pack and 256 channel gamma ray spectrometer just as the tests kicked off ...
I worked in a research lab like 30 years ago and it was all on computers. We had loads of generic data collected by someone somewhere and we just looked for patterns to infer sequences. I wrote Java and C++ and got my name on a paper. There were maybe a dozen scientists in the lab and they were all just coders with expertise in one or another field of biology. It was called a "dry lab".
I also have spent quite awhile as an exploration geophysicist. I miss it! I work purely with satellite data now, which is decidedly less tangible.
I've done a fair bit in the field, but a huge part of my career has been mining old datasets and reinterpreting things in light of new data/etc.
What the article is describing isn't new in any way. But it also doesn't remove the need for fieldwork or the need for the experience of having done fieldwork to use existing datasets. Observational sciences (e.g. geology, biology, etc) where you can't easily replicate the environment you are studying in the lab are always going to hinge on some sort of fieldwork.
Finding creative ways to use existing data doesn't change that.
I don't do research that requires fieldwork, but even in office and industrial settings, I notice that there's less need and interest in visits.
Of course, in-person exchanges still happen, but there's something of a default to do most things remotely because it's more efficient (and honestly, easier for all parties involved). The result is that you don't get to see cool or unusual machines/setups that often, and some flair of doing research is lost.
I can imagine that that's especially painful for new ecologists, because fieldwork is also a way to experience things that you otherwise wouldn't. Hopefully, we can bring some of it back with edge devices and models.
It’s been sad seeing journalism in the online era, where so much (not all!) content is produced without really visiting or researching things. Often it’s based only on statements / tweets, sometimes more seeping based on phone calls, sometimes reading a book on the topic, but rarely do journalists seem to show up anywhere.
When reading something like Didion’s piece on the LA highway central command, it shows how irreplaceable lived experience is.
> But, field work also brought amazing experiences, I visited the seaside 70+ times over a year, and got an insight into what a time series really means when you cover the tidal and weather and seasonal cycles.
I’m not exactly sure if we share a similar experience, but living on a trail in the Santa Cruz mountains affords me the opportunity to hike the same trails every weekend, year round (or even daily).
I’m not taking measurements, but it’s incredible to witness the effect of seasons on familiar territory just a few miles outside town. The weather changes, the wildlife changes and the air changes (moist to dry and back).
It’s an incredibly special experience to revisit the same place time and time again and witness the impact of … time. I hope you found something else to replace your familiar seaside.
Field work is likely to become less common, because ‘ground truth’ (as error prone as it may be), is an existential threat to a lot of people’s comforts and state of mind right now.
After all, if you want a different answer, you can easily tweak a model.
Much harder to force a bunch of people in the field to not see what they see. Certainly not impossible, however!
I think this is a classic old-vs-new tale. I started my PhD in biochemical research where analyzing data by hand was definitely a "craft" in some aspects. Later I forewent going to the lab entirely and instead spent all my time on developing machine learning for automated data analysis. But just like field work, you still need people in labs who can continue the craft.
The article should perhaps introspect a bit more instead of setting up a false dichotomy between "rainforest field work or computers".
It's also always error-prone. Nothing in the field is perfect. Reality is a bad approximation for your model at times, if you take a model centric view.
I would be immensely skeptical that field work is ever going away. There may be aspects of truth in this around cost of travel, risk, seniority.