What diatoms have we covered in 2015-2020?

DOM #59 might down as the shortest Diatom of the Month ever, so please do take a good look at our performance so far! Let’s see what diatom ‘characters’ have been the protagonists of our stories so far. From November 2015 to September 2020, our DOM blog series talked about 31 different diatom genera in 38 posts (2 posts for Aulacoseira, Cyclotella, Gomphonema, and Nitzschia and 3 posts on Mastogloia taxa), as depicted and listed by morphologic group in Figure 1 & Table 1. Biraphid taxa have been covered in 42% of the 38 posts dealing with specific taxa and centric taxa featured in 32 % of the posts. The other 21 posts had broader topics looking at community ecology, methods, online resources for diatomists, and diatom art.

Figure 1. Breakdown of the 31 diatom genera covered in DOM posts by morphological group

Table 1. Breakdown of 31 diatom genera covered in DOM posts thus far (www.diatoms.org covers 164 genera)

We have been monitoring the impact of Diatom of the Month on social media. Fig. 2 shows how Twitter and Facebook engagements and blog views evolved through time. Clearly, readership reach DOM by Twitter mostly, followed by Facebook and directly via the blog / website. We keep efforts to engage the community through different platforms. DOM started being hosted in FCE’s Wading Through Research blog, then in Young Diatomists blog, and currently is hosted on the new brand ISDR website. On average, each post reached 1,289 people on Twitter (mean number of users engaged: 47) 614 people on Facebook (mean number of likes: 25) and had 272 blog views (out of 58 posts published so far).

Fig. 2 Social media reach of DOM by platform: Twitter (read), Facebook (blue) and blog/ website views (yellow)

The Twitter and Facebook figures correspond to >3% engagement rate (number of likes or engagements / people reached), with higher recent peaks on Twitter (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Percentage of users engaged on Twitter

Since 2015, we strive for effectiveness in communicating diatom research to audiences of experts and to the general public. Let us all keep this series going! We are looking forward to publishing more diatom stories, especially from understudied ecosystems and regions of the world and welcoming new collaborators and ISDR members to bring their ideas on DOM’s online presence.

If you would like to write a post but aren’t sure about the topic, we are also happy to co-develop an outline together. Contact the DOM editors at https://isdr.org/about-dom/