Natural history is in danger of disappearing at a time it is most needed to address societal issues. It is especially important that it remain viable in the curriculum of colleges and universities, where we teach the leaders of the future. The combination of natural history, collections, and the university setting has afforded a unique opportunity for their synergistic effects to yield important insights into major issues facing our world today. The value of these collections only increases with time, as many collections include data that have been accruing for over 100 years. This makes collections on natural history extremely useful in addressing issues such as climate change and conservation, which require a long temporal view - longer than that of one generation of biologists. We coined the term Archival Natural History to generally describe new opportunities to use natural history collections in concert with new technologies to provide answers to vexing problems that require a historical perspective. Such questions could not be addressed without the long temporal view provided by natural history collections.
Results/Conclusions
Our work for "Texas Natural History: A Century of Change" was based on archival natural history. Without the rich natural history archives available in repositories around the country, such a perspective would not have been possible. Many others have tapped this archival material to examine a diverse array of phenomena, including the impact of climate change on small mammal communities in the Yosemites, fishing pressure on the age structure of saltwater fish communities in Florida, and how El Niño events influence hantavirus outbreaks in the southwestern United States, to name a few. The real value of natural history collections in revealing historical patterns in nature is not simply that the collections exist, but how they are archived. They provide accurate documentation of change, not anecdotal descriptions of change. In this, we are beginning to see the development of a new aspect of natural history that will have significant societal applications. Although the extinction of natural history at universities was predicted nearly a decade ago, in our opinion, natural history is far from dead. It is instead just beginning to demonstrate the magnitude of its importance in addressing complex, long-reaching societal issues that we face today.
