I saw a story on CNN earlier today that really made me think. It talked about 90 years worth of hand-written notes that average people had taken while bird-watching.
Now, every year (sometimes more than once a year) I do a brief story on the annual Bird Count, in which people head out into the area around where they live and tally up the numbers and the species of birds that they see.
While I’m not nearly that interested in birds specifically to join them on that quest, I can definitely see the value in having that information recorded. We keep track of so many things — from the weather to the stock market to how many bushels of wheat we produce — it just seems like we should also be keeping track of how many birds are around.
But that’s nobody’s job, really. It’s not “economically significant” or something. So it falls to an ever-shifting cadre of dedicated volunteers. And, in the aggregate, they come up with some really great data.
CNN tells of a similar project, over a century or so, in which amateur ornithologists recorded their observations on note cards. Those note cards, though, have been in danger of getting tossed out ever since the program wound down — until now:
Now, for the first time ever, the paper files are being scanned, transcribed and converted into a digital database for online access.
“These cards, once transcribed, will provide over 90 years of data — an unprecedented amount of information describing bird distributions, migration time and migration pathways, and how they are changing,” Zelt said.
The collection contains data on about 900 bird species, some of which — the Guadalupe storm-petrel, Labrador duck, Guadalupe caracara, great auk, Carolina parakeet and passenger pigeon — have gone extinct.
Although the article focuses on how scientists will be able to mine the newly-digitized data for information on climate change, I can see hundreds of scientifically interesting uses.
It also reminded me of a similar story that I read a while back, about a family who kept records of a lake’s biodivirsity through several generations. It took me a while to track it down, but I found it in the New York Times:
Every week to 10 days, by boat in summer and over the ice in winter, he crossed the lake to a spot about a mile and a half from Bolshie Koty, a small village in the piney woods on [Lake] Baikal’s northwest shore. There, Dr. Kozhov, a professor at Irkutsk State University, would record water temperature and clarity and track the plant and animal plankton species as deep as 2,400 feet.
Soon his daughter Olga M. Kozhova began assisting him and, eventually her daughter, Lyubov Izmesteva, joined the project. They kept at it over the years, producing an extraordinary record of the lake and its health.
That kind of information — regular and precisely tabulated for decades on end — is absolutely irreplaceable. It’s the kind of data that scientists try to approximate when they drill ice cores.
Lake Baikal, by the way, turns out to be a really interesting lake to study — it’s got fantastic biodiversity, including a fish that disintegrates into oil when exposed to sunlight (sadly, not called a vampire fish) and freshwater seals. It’s also smaller than any of the North American “Great Lakes”, but because it’s so deep, it actually contains more water than all of them put together. In fact, it contains a full 20% of all the world’s freshwater.
What’s neat now is that these old scientific records, when finally entered into a computer, can be — for the first time — subjected to detailed statistical analysis. It’s really a gold mine for researchers, and I’m genuinely thankful to the people who are dedicated enough to do this.
Closer to where I live, by the way, there’s the Criddle/Vane homestead, which has long-term plant and entomological records from the Canadian Prairies.
