The Natural History Initiative: An introduction

Background/Question/Methods: Natural History is practiced in different ways by different people, but the communal practice of observing, classifying, interpreting, and describing the non—human world is central to any effort focused on sustainable progress and evidence-based management. The natural history initiative begins with the premise that we are doing too little natural history, as a society.  In response, we have sponsored a series of workshops aimed at exploring the importance of natural history in society, in education, and in research, conservation, and environmental management.   These workshops, and the products that are coming from these workshops, form a cross-disciplinary effort to resuscitate the practice of natural history, and collectively, we aim to articulate the importance of natural history to a populace that has been moving away from natural history over the past 100 years, and moving away from nature for the past 25 years.   We are doing this work by building an inclusive network and supporting related efforts (the new Natural History Section at ESA, for example), and by making the case for the importance of natural history in education, research, management, and in society in general.

Results/Conclusions: Here I will report on three themes.  First, I present results from a series of metrics aimed at measuring change in the use and interest in natural history within the United States.  Virtually all of these metrics show a declining use of natural history.  I will then make an argument for natural history as a natural bridge between the arts and sciences, as well as between research and education, public policy and personal practice.  I will discuss our efforts to form a network that supports these and other links and provide a brief introduction to the workshops themselves.  Finally, I will describe some case studies that demonstrate the economic, health, and security related costs of managing the non-human world without sufficient natural history, the benefits of incorporating sufficient natural history into management, and the prices we have paid when we have ignored the natural history we already know.    These case studies range from current problems - successes and failures in predicting the impacts of climate change on pest pressure and disease transmission to well studied examples in recent history, including the economic impact of the cod fishery collapse, and the shift from DDT and broad-spectrum pesticides to integrated pest management (IPM).