At an ESA Annual Meeting, a herpetology graduate student and other highly dissimilar ecologists can find themselves sharing ideas. Sustaining those connections afterward is harder. Ecology spans many subdisciplines, sectors, and career stages, while its audiences include academics, policy makers, resource managers, teachers, and students. Frontiers was created as an accessible forum where ecological and environmental sciences could intersect; podcasting offers ESA and Frontiers a new way to extend that mission beyond the meeting and the page [1]. A podcast is an audio file distributed online; through “syndication,” or automatic delivery of new episodes to subscribers, it can fit into listeners’ existing routines. More than summarizing a paper, an interview can let authors explain methods, implications, and future directions in plainer language—and in their own voices—helping unfamiliar audiences decide when to read further [1].
That idea took concrete form in January 2008, when ESA launched Beyond the Frontier, a monthly podcast featuring interviews with authors of papers in that month’s issue of Frontiers [1]. A podcast is an audio file distributed online; through syndication—a feed that automatically delivers new episodes to subscribers—listeners can receive episodes through a podcatcher such as iTunes and play them on a computer or portable player [1].
Beyond the Frontier differs from ESA’s other podcasts: Field Talk highlights papers from Ecology, Ecological Applications, and Ecological Monographs, while The Ecologist Goes to Washington presents ecological issues in a policy context [1]. The Frontiers program gives authors room to discuss their methods and results in greater depth and plainer language than a paper permits. They can also explain implications and future directions, add supporting information such as anecdotes, and share updates that were not included in the article [1]. Most importantly, listeners hear the research in the author’s own voice [1].