Two Years of Science Corner

Written by: Jessica Alvarez

I joined Blue Forest in January 2020, and in my new role as Communications lead, one of the things I was most excited about was getting to work on the newsletter. Prior to Blue Forest, I had worked in both journalism and public relations—mostly in music and the arts. This was my first role focusing on environmental and science communications.

Making the Blue Forest newsletter an informative publication worth reading, one that is representative of our organization and company culture, was a fun yet challenging exercise for someone not especially familiar with a lot of the scientific terminology and concepts we were trying to communicate. Because Blue Forest had never had a full-time communications person, I basically had a clean canvas to work from, which allowed me to be creative but was also a huge undertaking.

The first Blue Forest newsletter I published in February 2020 has been our most widely read to date. This was, and continues to be, particularly exciting for me both as a newcomer to Blue Forest and as a content creator. Over the past two years, I have tried new things (some successful, others not as much), have renamed the publication, and have worked to progressively solidify our sections and content based on what our followers like and read.

The one thing that’s remained from the original, basic template has been Science Corner. For someone with a non-science background, publishing Science Corner every month has given me the chance to learn so much, but also to work with our amazing science team on publishing stories about research that they find compelling. Every Science Corner we have published over the past two years (14 to date) has been an opportunity to give the members of the Blue Forest science team a platform on which to 1) highlight a new research article relevant to our partners and mission, 2) interview the authors to hear their perspective on the work, 3) take a deeper dive into the research, and 4) synthesize the biggest takeaways and implications of their findings. By highlighting these papers, we hope to bring attention to the diversity of research informing Blue Forest’s work and to help our community learn about new and exciting science.

Science Corner covers a broad range of topics and is accessible to non-sciency folks like myself. It’s always well-written and reported and is based on some of the best, most recent, research from reputable sources, including Blue Forest’s science advisors. Most importantly, you can count on it each month and it will consistently inform, question, and inspire.

I am incredibly grateful to be able to work with our science team and to share this awesome source of knowledge, information, and great writing with our readers. With this in mind, we thought it’d be a nice touch to compile all this content into one place and are happy to share with you our brand new Science Corner page, including all fourteen installments to date in one convenient place.

On behalf of the Blue Forest team, I’d like to thank all of the authors and researchers who have allowed us to share their work and collaborated with us on Science Corner over the past two years. Here’s to more science, research, and science-based solutions that will allow us to continue to make a positive impact on the world.

Enjoy!