Mosses and Matriculation

When most scientists begin their research careers, they’re obsessed with their subject. I know I was (and still am) obsessed with volcanoes. Since many research jobs are located at colleges and universities, oftentimes scientists find themselves not just teaching but also on the front lines of solving problems in higher education.

That means on one hand, you might be researching mosses that grow in the most unexpected places – deserts – while with the other hand you’re chairing an entire biology department. Talk about multitasking!

I’m your host Jess Phoenix, and this is science.

Jess: I'm joined by Dr. Kirsten Fisher, chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at California State University, Los Angeles. When she's not wrangling the department, Kirsten researches bryophytes or nonvascular plants. So, we're talking mosses, lichens, etc. Since most people don't go about their days thinking about either mosses or the state of science in higher education, Kirsten can give us an insider's view on both topics. Thanks so much for making time to talk with me today. And I'd like to start with a quick biology lesson. So, what are bryophytes and why do they matter?

Dr. Fisher: Thanks, Jess. Thanks so much for inviting me. This is really, really a treat because I get to talk about mosses. Bryophytes are a group of plants. They comprise the mosses and the liverworts and the hornworts. Some of their common features, I guess the main one and why they're nonvascular is that they have external water relations, which means that they don't have special tissues to carry water through the insides of their bodies. Instead, they rely on external water for their hydration. So, that means they're generally pretty short, and they tend to be super huge. And while you kind of tend to think of them as growing in moist sort of places where they won't dry out as quickly, they are quite well adapted actually to living in dry places as well. I study desert mosses that live out in the Mojave, and they do that through really kind of tricky and interesting physiological biology. So, they are able to dry out entirely and then resurrect when water is reintroduced. But, you know, in general, bryophytes, tiny little plants, they are sister to the vascular plants that most people are familiar with. Those are things like ferns and seed plants, things that have flowers and seeds and cones. The bryophytes have none of those things, but they're very prolific, very successful, and fairly small.

Jess: So, I know for a fact, most people really don't think about these things too often, but they are really important in different ecosystems. Tell me more about how they've adapted to survive in such varied environments. Do we have them in Arctic environments as well as deserts? I mean, where do we find these wonder plants?

Dr. Fisher: Yeah, yes. The wondrous plants. They are all over the place. Yeah, absolutely. So, pretty much the only place you won't find bryophytes, to my knowledge anyway, is the ocean. So, they don't exist in saltwater, but you find them in freshwater environments, lakes, and streams. They can survive extreme heat and also extreme cold. So, they are one of the few plants you will find growing in Antarctica, for example. So, they can freeze, they're at very high elevations, they're in very wet places. So, they are super important actually in terms of global climate change, right? Probably, the most important mosses to consider are those that are in the peatlands, both sort of like the contemporary peat mosses that are still out there doing photosynthesis and capturing massive quantities of carbon up in the boreal areas of the globe, but then also the vast stores of their biomass that hasn't degraded for millions of years and it's basically still capturing all of that CO2 for now. It’s like they're a huge carbon sink, particularly in boreal places.

Dr. Fisher: Yeah. So, mosses and bryophytes are really responsible for a great quantity of photosynthesis and carbon capture and primary productivity around the world. So, quite important in terms of global carbon balance and climate considerations.

Jess: I wanted to address the climate change angle, and we know that climate change is real and it impacts every environment on the planet in a whole bunch of different ways. So, are you seeing any changes with the mosses you research specifically? And can you identify any trends around the world that are happening with bryophytes?

Dr. Fisher: Yeah, that's a great question, Jess. So, from my perspective, so, I work on these desert mosses that are very specialized to dry, cold deserts, so, places that only receive their rainfall during the winter months when it's fairly cool and overcast, and they can stay hydrated for a fairly long time because it's cool in the wintertime when they get their water from, you know, brief rains, albeit brief, but there's still rains.

What I see happening with climate change and what we sort of noticed is that there has been, I think, sort of a shift in terms of the patterns of rainfall and what seasons they fall in, at least, you know, from my small corner of the world, right? We're seeing more summer rains now. And that is particularly detrimental to the mosses that I work on.

So, a lot of these desert mosses and bryophytes are adapted to being wet and cold and photosynthesizing in cool weather when it's wet, and they can stay hydrated for a long time because evaporation and water loss is low. When you get them wet in the summertime, they don't have time to basically, you know, do their photosynthesis and get more energy to sort of repair themselves and fix themselves up from being rehydrated before they dry out again. And so, that will actually kill a moss pretty quickly. When they're wet the wrong season and they sort of run into having this negative energy balance because they got wet in the wrong season, they'll die pretty quickly. And so, we are seeing some mortality in places in the Mojave where they're getting more summer rainfall than they used to. That's just one small example.

Jess: For people listening who haven't had a biology class in a few years or maybe a few decades, tell us about kind of the broader role, bryophytes, fungi, etc., things that we don't think of like we think of trees, different sorts of plants. What's the broader role that those play? You mentioned the carbon capture, but what do they do for the rest of the health and functioning of ecosystems?

Dr. Fisher: Yeah. So, I'll focus on mosses since they're my bias, I suppose, in terms of nonvascular small plants. So, mosses are really important for not just carbon capture, but also for nutrient cycling in a lot of different ecosystems. So, they're doing photosynthesis, right? And they're generating carbohydrates that are then sort of, you know, they percolate down through the ecosystem and are utilized. And again, I'm sort of desert-centric, I suppose, but mosses are an important member of bio-crest communities. So, those are these kind of consortia of different organisms that live at the soil surface in dry lands and also non-dry lands, too, but they're particularly important in places like deserts that have pretty low productivity because the organisms there, which include mosses, as well as things like lichens and all kinds of different bacteria, some photosynthetic bacteria like cyanobacteria, nitrogen-fixing bacteria. So, these communities are really important in both sort of physical processes. So, they help to stabilize the soil surface, but then they're also really important in nutrient cycling as well. These mosses capturing carbon and bringing it into the system and then bacteria that bring in nitrogen into the system. These bio-crests tend to cover pretty large areas of land, probably more than vascular plants in many deserts.

Carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus are the really important elements for life. Those are kind of like the signature of life, right? We can't...and most other organisms, aside from some of the cool bacteria, aren't able to take nitrogen out of the atmosphere where it's super plentiful. By the way, it's really, really common in our air, but we aren't able to fix it from the air. But there are some bacteria that can do that and then sort of bring it into the biosphere for use by other organisms. So, nitrogen makes up a lot of our proteins and DNAs and stuff like that. So, like, really important for living organisms.

Jess: It's so interesting because these are organisms that most people will go through their life and not give a second thought to, and yet they are critical to life on the planet. It is the very fundamental building blocks. So, super fascinating. But I did want to ask you a little bit about some of the other work you've been doing at CSULA. I know that your lab has been working on how to digitize the university's herbarium. So, can you tell us a little bit about that work, too?

Dr. Fisher: We are a member of the California Consortium Herbaria, which is basically a group of herbaria around the state and also, actually, a few places in the periphery of the state that still hold quite significant California collections. And, yeah, one of our major goals has been to make the data in biodiversity collections like herbaria, which are, by the way, collections of plants, right? So, pressed plant specimens that are collected by different scientists and then accessioned and housed in herbaria as a reference, basically. So, they're sort of a snapshot of a plant at a given place and time. So, they're used for taxonomic purposes, as you might imagine. But they also hold a lot of interesting data on things like...well, that's very relevant to climate change, right? So, an herbarium specimen of a plant may or may not have...let's say if it's a vascular plant, might not have flowers or may have seeds. It was collected from a particular spot in California, let's say, at a given time of year, in a given year. And if you have lots of replication of this for a particular species across the state, you can start to look at shifts and things like flowering time, what we call phenology or fruiting time through the last, let's say, 100 years or even more of collection. It's a really interesting data source for understanding things like shifts and species distribution and also flowering time with changing climate trends.

Yeah, so part of that consortium, that's been working on getting all of our specimens, all of our collections digitized, which basically means photographed. First of all, like a high-resolution photograph. And then the data from that photograph need to be somewhere in a database for people to access, obviously, so they know where to look for the photograph of the specimen. And so, that's this transcription step. And for that, we've relied heavily on community science, actually. So, there's a great platform called Notes from Nature that has many of our CGH2 sort of collections, all the photographs. And so, folks from the community can go in and basically type in for us into the correct data fields things like the collector of the specimen, the species name, when it was collected, the date, any other information that might be in the label so that we can then bring that into our data sets. That's been a huge help. So, yeah, we have a pretty small herbarium here at Cal State LA, but there's still probably around 20,000 specimens to digitize.

Jess: Wait, that's 20,000 is small?

Dr. Fisher: Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of small. Yeah, some of the larger herbaria in the state are really, really huge collections. And, of course, they're definitely ahead of us in terms of getting this all data-based. But it's been pretty successful. We have all of our specimens data-based now, and they're in our California Consortium sort of data portal so anyone can access them online. Different scientists can use them for whatever purpose. It's been a really cool experience.

Jess: That's pretty valuable. And what a cool effort. Let's move a little bit more into the educational realm more fully here. So, you've been a professor at CSULA since 2008. And you've been involved in academia even before that during your own studies. So, what have you seen change in how science is taught and how students are learning science over the last few decades?

Dr. Fisher: I suddenly feel so old.

Jess: You and me both.

Dr. Fisher: Decades of science education. I would say probably for the last 20 years or so, there's definitely been a shift in science ed from teaching students the facts or teaching content as opposed to teaching the process of science, and trying to replicate something about the process of discovery and sort of almost more like what it means to be a scientist as opposed to just the scientific facts, right? That's pretty aspirational. It's difficult to do in a classroom, but we have, I think, made pretty good strides in terms of providing students with the tools they need to do science. So, how to ask a question, how to formulate a hypothesis, but then also allowing students the freedom to come up with their own questions, kind of given a relatively constrained scenario or what have you, a set of things to investigate or observe, but allowing students to develop their own questions and then investigate those using appropriate scientific methods of evaluating data. So, trying to teach students to be scientists, I think, more than just the science content has probably been the direction that we've gone in science ed for, like I said, a couple of decades now probably.

Jess: I have seen a bunch of articles and scientific papers calling out various crises in scientific higher education. For example, I saw one paper published by "CBE—Life Sciences Education." It identified three major areas that impacted student success in undergraduate biology, which I thought was relevant. And those three areas were course, instructor, and incoming preparation. And so, have you seen any problems in those areas of courses or instructors or the way students are prepared for college that impact how the students perform in your department's classes?

Dr. Fisher: Yeah. So, there's definitely been...and this is a positive shift, I think, in the last maybe 10 years even, there's been a shift from a deficit model, where we blame the students for their poor performance in our courses and taking a better look at sort of like, "What is it structurally, right? What are we doing that is setting students up not to succeed in our courses?" So, trying to sort of flip the narrative, I think, to make it more about creating equitable spaces to learn in and creating opportunities for students to succeed and recognizing that if they're coming in with certain...you know, what we used to call deficiencies, but we don't use those terms anymore, right? Like, if they're coming in underprepared in some area, and that's not on them, that's because of perhaps, you know, the high school they went to or what have you, then we need to figure out ways of building them up within our courses so that they're able to succeed despite maybe coming from a different place than... You know, when you have a classroom full of students, you know, there's a heterogeneous mix of folks in terms of their preparation for your course, and so that's always a challenge. I think that'll always be a challenge.

It's just kind of how we approach that challenge, I think, in trying to shift it away from the student's responsibility solely to putting more onus on the instructor and also just the course design and what we're asking students to do and what we're sort of like presenting as the values, if you will, of the course even has a big impact, I think, on how students will perform in the course. So, trying to be more nuanced in those areas, I would say, is a big shift. But, yeah, I mean, I don't know if I've seen a huge change in terms of student preparedness or... I think instructor attitudes have definitely shifted more into the realm of trying to look for assets, really kind of like an asset-based approach to teaching as opposed to blaming students for doing poorly in their courses.

Jess: I think that's a good thing.

Dr. Fisher: Yeah, it's been a positive shift, and there are more resources, I think, available to instructors now than when I first started, too. We have really great centers for teaching and learning that are helping folks kind of think about what their classroom environment is like and what the structure of the course is telling students and how they can maybe tinker with a few things and make it a more equitable experience for their students. So, yeah, I would say, in general, it's kind of been a positive trend. I guess I should temper that with the pandemic really, just destroyed everything, right? It's going to take a long time to recover from that. I think student expectations about what it means to be a student and particularly a college student, I think those shifted during the pandemic. And so, we're sort of slowly moving back in the direction of maybe where we were pre-pandemic, but I don't know if we'll ever quite get there, right?

Jess: We've seen articles about that, too, about how it's impacted students in so many ways, students of all levels. I think a lot of people never got some foundational pieces that, say, you or I got when we were studying science, when we were younger. And you're right, I think it's going to take a long time to recover.

Dr. Fisher: I think we're moving away from just teaching those pieces and just teaching content because anyone now, it's pretty easy to go and look up a fact. If you need to find out something, it's at your fingertips and it's pretty straightforward. But how you synthesize those facts, how you turn them into a robust research question, you have to understand how things work together, and kind of a more synthetic level of understanding in order to do science. And so, training students to think like that, I think it's our job, more than just like getting them to memorize, you know, the enzymes involved in the Krebs cycle or whatever. But, yeah, it's more fun, but probably also harder to teach and assess that sort of thinking like a scientist, right?

Jess: Oh, I bet, I bet. And so, for full disclosure to the audience, Cal State LA is where I earned my master's degree in geology. So, I have a little bit of insider knowledge about the institution. The university is designated as a minority-serving institution, Hispanic-serving institution, and Asian American and Native American/Pacific Islander-serving institution. So, those are all federal designations. And I actually just looked up online that apparently 70% of students at CSULA now are first-generation college students. So, from your experience, Kirsten, are these students receiving enough support from the K-12 education system, the government, and their own communities to achieve their higher education goals?

Dr. Fisher: I have to choose my words carefully. I mean, from K-12 system... And again, it's really not on the K-12 system in our area. I think it has more to do with just the resources available. So, yeah, from my perspective, a lot of students come in to our major having not taken a biology course in high school, or maybe they took something kind of like biology, like in their sophomore or freshman year. And so, yeah, there's definitely a preparation issue. That is to say, you know, these students, they were really strong students in their high schools. It's just that they may not have had the opportunity to take calculus or take math courses that really spent the time to teach them how to understand the math that they're doing as opposed to just kind of going through the same procedure repeatedly and not really understanding why.

Yeah, so I will say, you know, the community that we serve here at Cal State LA, I would say that a lot of the students are coming in probably less prepared than they could be from K-12. But again, that's not on them and it's really not on our public schools either. It's just how much funding we have to do things, given the massive size of LAUSD, for example, right? Huge. It's like a state in itself. So, yeah. And local community is super supportive. I think for the most part, that's my impression is that families are so proud to have kids here and going to college. I think where we need to come in as higher ed educators is to recognize that there's, like, a whole secret code to being in college of stuff that we might take for granted if our parents went to college and we understand all those things, that someone who doesn't have that support system at home, not because of lack of supportiveness or enthusiasm, but just because your parents didn't have the opportunity to go to college, so they can't teach you what office hours are really, or how to advocate for yourself in certain situations with the administrator, all those things.

So, I feel like we need to be extra sensitive to that and try to make some of these hidden rules of college as transparent as possible and really explain things. And that, again, I think, was exacerbated by the pandemic. Not only were you not in high school, but you were at home, really not learning a lot of stuff about what it means to be a student in some ways, like how to take notes…I found that I needed to actually hang out with my students and go through the process of making flashcards with them. Particularly through the pandemic, I think a lot of those sort of student skills might have been lost. So, you just have to be sensitive to those things, I think, when you're teaching.

Jess: Right. And so, let's talk about science students specifically. So, our students from historically misrepresented and underrepresented backgrounds, are they receiving the same opportunities in the sciences as students with more privilege? Are they able to attend the same conferences, take the same internships, and get the same jobs or graduate school positions?

Dr. Fisher: It's probably institution-specific, right? So, I will use our institution as an example, or probably the CSU, in general, but maybe our institution in particular. We are under-resourced. And so, we recognize that there are disparities. And so, we try to rectify those to the best of our ability, given the resources at hand. So, those are things that are definitely on our minds and concern, I think, the faculty and administration here quite deeply. It's just a matter of how to replicate those things or make those opportunities available to students, given limited budgets. So, I'll take, I think, a classic example is faculty-mentored, individualized research experiences. A student going to a liberal arts college on the East Coast as undergraduates..

Those students have opportunities to work with faculty in their research labs. It's kind of almost like a guarantee that you're going to do that for a senior thesis or something. That costs a lot of money. I won't get into the gritty details of student-faculty ratios and how our budgets work, but let's just say that individualized research is something that we all recognize widely as being a super high-impact practice. It is one of the best ways of ensuring that students go on into graduate school and are successful as scientists and are motivated to do science. And it's also really hard for us to do here because of our budgetary situation. And so, we do our best to offer those opportunities, but it's not the same access that someone going to a private liberal arts college is going to have. So, I mean, that's just one example. So, we're definitely aware, I would say, of those high-impact practices and what we want to provide for students so that they can do the things that they should be able to do if they come to college and be successful. It's difficult sometimes. Yeah, I mean, we have things like travel funds for undergraduates who want to go to conferences and those types of things. So, there are some supports there, but it's not as extensive, I'm sure, as going to college where you pay more tuition.

Jess: The distribution of resources is uneven, and that is a fact. So then, not just as far as strict academia goes, but in general, what do you think people working in the sciences, so anybody, private sector, government, academia, what do you think that we can do to ensure that the next generation of scientists, so our current and future students, are able to pursue the research they love, like bryophytes or volcanoes, and the research that the world needs? What can we do?

Dr. Fisher: I guess if you do work in the industry, if you're a scientist or you work for a biotech company, or you're some way involved in those areas, I would say one thing that can be done is to provide more internship opportunities for college students. I think those tend to also be a really high-impact experience for our students when they can get an internship, let's say, with a biotech company for a semester and get some of that hands-on experience. I think it not only motivates them to maybe go on and to do an additional degree after they graduate from their bachelor's, but it also provides them with just the resume skills that is going to help propel them even if they just go for a job. So, I think that's one area. I guess broadening your definition of what you expect a scientist to look like, I know that sounds petty, but it's true. I think there's still expectations that scientists are like White dudes with beards and lab coats. And so, broadening our expectations, understanding that it's not the only face of science. I don't know what form that takes, but just to have that lens, I think is important potentially for folks to succeed. Yeah, I don't know.

Jess: Nearing the end here. So, the final question for all of my guests on "This is Science" is a two-part one. So, the first part is you're a scientist and an educator, and we are the union of concerned scientists. So, Kirsten, why are you concerned?

Dr. Fisher: Why am I concerned? I'm concerned that people have forgotten what science is. And I know because I should clarify that. I think the evaluation of evidence and making evidence-based decisions. I mean, actually looking at empirical evidence and using that to base your decisions on and to found your understanding of reality and the world around you. I feel like that is becoming a lost skill. And so, I guess maybe that's a little bit high level in terms of what I'm concerned about for science, but that would be, I guess, like, the ability of everyday folks to actually put on scientist caps and evaluate evidence and make evidence-based decisions and not create narratives to fit whatever scenario is appropriate at the time. I guess that's my major concern.

Jess: Yeah, that's a good one. And I do like to end with optimism here. So, what are you doing about that concern?

Dr. Fisher: Oh my goodness. Well, hey, I work in higher education, right? Like, yeah. So, trying to teach the difference between scientific epistemology and other types of ways of knowing, right? There's all these different ways of knowing. So, trying to help students understand the difference about, like, you know, there's certain questions science can answer and certain questions that other forms of knowing, you know, philosophy or what have you, those answer different types of questions, rationalism versus empiricism, all that good stuff. So, I think I can do that. I can help students try to learn how to evaluate sources, understand just the process of science that it's not...you know, and also scientific language is important. So, understanding that a scientific theory is different than the way we use theory in casual conversation, for example. And it's not just a theory that it's actually, you know, well-substantiated, well-supported explanation, you know, a mechanistic explanation for something that happens in nature, right? It's a real thing. Those types of things, I think, are probably the most important contribution that we can make as science educators, less so than the cool stuff that I like about mosses is great, but understanding, I think, how to understand the world around you in a reality-based way with evidence is probably more important.

Thanks to Kirsten Fisher for taking the time to talk with me. Thanks also to Omari Spears and Abby Figueroa for production help.

See ya later, science gators!