21st Century natural history – no longer alone on the Beagle

Background/Question/Methods: The fundamental properties of natural systems – how and where organisms live, and the biotic and abiotic interactions linking them to communities and ecosystems – are the domain of natural history.  This is perhaps the oldest branch of biology, and there is now an entire genre of literature that argues for the importance of natural history and decries the decline and eminent extinction of the field within the sciences.   Here we use a wide range of data sources, including data on biological collections in North America and worldwide, trends in PhD emphasis, content analysis of introductory biology texts, and curriculum requirements for Biology B.S. degree programs in the US, to assess the claim that exposure to natural history has declined in the past 60 years, and we use a series of case-studies to examine the importance of natural history in various aspects of society.

Results/Conclusions: We find compelling evidence from a wide range of data sources supporting a broad ranging decline in exposure to natural history in institutions of higher education, but little evidence for the impending extinction of the field.  Consolidation of museum collections and reductions in the number of active herbaria are the result of changing budget priorities in US and European educational institutions. These changes, coupled with the explosive growth in sub-organismal disciplines in biology over the past 50 years, have caused a sea-change in the center of gravity for biology departments in north America, resulting in reduced emphasis on natural history and the large-scale elimination of natural history requirements for a B.S. degree in Biology.   These changes are not uniformly negative –in many ways they reflect a dramatic rise in the importance of biology as a discipline - but we argue that a continued shift in emphasis away from organisms in their natural environment will significantly reduce the amount of predictive, solution oriented ecology we can produce as a society, and lead to reductions in our capacity for evidence-driven decision making.  We support this argument by examining the importance of natural history in the fields of human health, energy, food security, and land, water, and species management, highlighting the importance of natural history in the development of sound management and missteps that have occurred in the absence of natural history.  Finally, we explore opportunities for a renewed emphasis on the collection, curation and dissemination of empirical knowledge.