Above: Diane Thomson (far left, with red backpack straps) with a restoration ecology class on a 1992 field trip to a mine reclamation site. Photo courtesy of Diane Thomson

Diane Thomson, PhD, returned to RMBL this past August for an integral projection model workshop, her first time back since her only other RMBL experience as an undergraduate researcher in 1992. But one transformative experience can shape a life. The RMBL summer of 1992 had such an effect on Thomson. “I think there are a lot of people like me who only got to go to RMBL once,” Thomson said. “But it was still hugely influential.”

In the decades between, she built a career as an ecologist studying plant-pollinator interactions, climate change, conservation, and the power of long-term ecological data. Thomson is now a professor of biology and environmental sciences at Pitzer and Scripps colleges in Claremont, California.

Thomson grew up in Tucson, Arizona, surrounded by the Sonoran Desert. As an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, she was looking for an immersive summer ecology experience when she asked ecologist Mike Rosenzweig, PhD, for advice. He pointed her toward RMBL.

The trip from the desert Southwest to Gothic provided a dramatic change. Thomson arrived at 9,500-foot RMBL and adjusted quickly to cold nights, rugged terrain, and life in a small scientific community. She remembers sleeping in Ore House, with mice for roommates. Mostly, she remembers the sense of wonder that both the mountain environment and the science fostered.

“We learned about the full array of research happening at the field station,” she said, “from bird behavior to aquatics to pollination.”

Thomson took summer courses, learning from scientists and teachers including Allison Brody, PhD; Rosemary Smith, PhD; and John Cairns, PhD. The experience exposed her to a scientific culture that was different from what she had encountered in classrooms.

What really stood out was the community setting for science that RMBL provides. Textbooks can make science appear to be the work of brilliant individuals making isolated discoveries. At RMBL, Thomson saw scientists living together, talking about their work on hikes, challenging and learning from each other, and having fun doing it.

That experience helped Thomson imagine a life in science. “It was my first chance to see what this kind of work was like in real life,” Thomson reflected. “And I might have gone down that route anyway — you never know — but that experience shaped my path.”

After RMBL, Thomson continued her education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she worked with ecologist Dan Doak, PhD. She came to focus on plant-pollinator relationships, introduced species, honeybees and bumblebees, and the ways ecological patterns can change over time. “Long-term data really help us capture patterns that are not detectable over a shorter time period,” she said.

The value of those datasets often grows in ways researchers could never have anticipated when the studies began. “We’re especially fortunate when long-term data can be creatively repurposed,” she said. “Some of the things that I’ve done with my long-term data, I had no intention of doing that when I started.”

One example came after a wildfire. “Because I had access to pre-fire data, I was able to then use those data to try and address concerns about how the community had changed after fire,” she said.

That experience reinforced a lesson she has carried throughout her career: The original question that motivates a study may not be the most important question the resulting data eventually allow scientists to ask. “The original goal of the study might have been one thing,” Thomson said, “but over many years, having continued to build those datasets, they’ve enabled a lot of really interesting research that asks questions that maybe weren’t the original intent.”

Her work has also made her cautious about simple explanations of ecological change. A decline in one species may be connected to changes in another species, changes in plants, rainfall, temperature, or some combination of factors. “It’s one thing to say bumblebee numbers have gone down, and another thing to say I can connect that with when honeybees go up, bumblebees go down, I see that connection in my data, and then the plants are connected too,” she said. “And now you have some machinery to say, like, OK, well, if honeybees went away, if we restored some plant habitat, then we might expect that pattern to reverse.”

Complexity is part of what keeps Thomson interested in ecological research. Models can help researchers move beyond simply describing a trend and toward understanding the mechanisms behind it. “Just because you can show a trend line through something doesn’t mean you understand how it works,” she said. Climate change makes embracing complexity even more important.

For Thomson, the lesson is not that ecological change is easy to predict. It is that long-term observation can reveal a world that is more complicated — and sometimes more hopeful — than our first mental models suggest.

On her return, much had changed. But some things remained immediately recognizable. “It was really interesting, because obviously the field station has changed a lot,” Thomson said. “There are some things that are still the same, but there’s been a lot of new cabin construction, and there was a big renovation of the old cabins. But when the dinner bell rings, that brings back a lot of memories. Ore House is still there.”

More meaningful than the sounds and buildings, though, was reconnecting with former teachers. Thomson was particularly happy to see Rosemary Smith, whom she had not seen since her student days at RMBL. “It’d been over 30 years, and it was really fun to connect with her and say thank you,” she said.

A single summer at a field station does not necessarily determine one’s way of life or one’s way of being. For Thomson, though, that summer helped establish a way of seeing science: as a community, as a long-term practice, and as a process of asking better questions as the evidence changes and complexity grows.

— John Hausdoerffer, PhD
Director of Story
Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory