Generating Ecological Insights from Historical Data

 By Richard B. Primack

 

“The past is the canvas on which our idea is painted - the dim prospectus of our future field. We are dreaming of what we are to do.” Henry David Thoreau in his Reform Papers.

Ecologists worldwide are searching for historical datasets that can provide insights into how ecosystems and species are responding to climate change, often with a focus on changes in species’ phenology, distribution, and abundance.

In a recent article, we describe a number of examples of this approach, including a resurvey of Joseph Grinnell’s records of birds in the California mountains and our own research repeating Henry David Thoreau’s observations of the plants and birds in Concord, Massachusetts.  

Figure (a). Statue of Thoreau with a replica of his cabin at Walden Pond State Park. 

 

The digitization of museum collections and the recent explosion in citizen-science projects, such as Nature's Notebook and eBird, are offering new sources of data to test possible links among ecological phenomena, both past and present, observed at various scales.

Figure (b). Locations of herbarium specimens used to determine if Concord phenological patterns occur across eastern North America.

Figure (c). Herbarium specimen of trout lily (Erythronium americanum), a woodland wildflower. 

These types of studies – linking detailed site-specific historical datasets with larger-scale data from museum collections or citizen-science records – provide two additional benefits: they can help assess the quality of local-scale datasets and they can create compelling stories to communicate to the public about science in general and climate change in particular.

Figure (d). Based on herbarium specimens, the window of spring sunlight available to woodland wildflowers is predicted to decrease by 2100, with the strongest effects seen in the north.

Access the article here: LINK