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Media Initiative

The Society of Wetland Scientists' mission is to promote understanding, conservation, protection, restoration, science-based management and sustainability of wetlands. Currently, SWS achieves these goals by hosting webinars and meetings, publishing newsletters, moderating discussion forums and granting access to research journals, among other activities. Videos are a thriving communications medium, and are another effective way to share our mission.

The SWS Media Team launched the SWS YouTube channel to share our mission with a wider audience. To help us with this initiative, we ask for members and non-members alike to share their work and experiences by submitting a video to be featured on our YouTube channel! Featured wetland videos showcase various wetland topics that help to further our mission.

Submit a Video

To maintain credible, relevant content, please follow our guidelines for video submission. Please review these guidelines before embarking on your video project. Your video must be approved by the SWS Media Team before being posted to the SWS YouTube channel. The editors will contact you via email to provide feedback on your video and to notify you when your video has been approved.

Benefits

Exposure
Exposing your work to the public, colleagues and the SWS community can improve networking, collaboration and advancement of your work

  • Video abstracts can raise the online profile of a published paper. Authors who have published in Wetlands or other journals may be interested in creating a video specifically about a recent paper, which can raise its overall profile. Viewers can be pointed to the paper via a hyperlink in the video description (the more links to it, the higher a paper ranks in an online search).
  • Media interactions. Journalists love videos they can use in a media announcement about a scientific paper. It's advantageous to have a video ready to go when a media outlet contacts you about a recent publication. Journalists will often embed the video in their online article, which can multiply the attention of your work.
  • Grant funding. Videos can be used to meet the "broader impacts" criterion at National Science Foundation (NSF) and similar funding agencies. Reaching more people via video is a "broader impact" that can help an investigator meet the requirements of a government funding agency.
  • Article-level metrics. Videos can contribute to the altmetrics associated with a researcher. Some journals are even including an altmetric score as an additional gauge of impact (in addition to citations). A video that is easily shared via Facebook, Twitter, etc. can help increase the altmetric score. Such metrics may be used to evaluate someone's science communication ability in a job evaluation.

Effective communication
The importance of communicating technical information effectively to others

  • Support. Creating public support for wetlands by conveying important information that is digestible to the general public as opposed to technical reports that don’t reach mainstream viewers.
  • Innovation. It may be more common to read articles for most wetland professionals, but in this day and age of technology and smartphones, more people are apt to visual media. This can make it more accessible to learn about wetland-related topics on the go, where videos are easier to view than a journal article from a smartphone.

Education
Promoting understanding of wetland science, functions, and conservation to the public is a key objective of SWS

  • Learning. Continue your education by learning about the work of other wetland professionals.
  • Youth engagement. To inspire the future generation of wetland scientists, managers and supporters, using videos is a easy teaching tool to convey the importance of wetland principles while engaging and visually stimulating a young mind.
  • Outreach. Using videos to reach the general public or your target audience to gain support for grants, projects and conservation, among other important wetland-related topics.
  • Student recruitment. Use videos to attract students to wetland science. Students who are interested in science may know little to nothing about wetlands, but a video can show them how interesting and exciting it is to work in wetlands.

With this effort, we hope to expand and inform our network of wetland scientists, managers, and current and future students to support our mission and the conservation of wetlands, globally.

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